wolfgang ziegler


„make stuff and blog about it“

Got OneNote Crashes on Startup?

August 28, 2013

OneNote is (next to Outlook) my favorite Microsoft Office tool. I use it both at work and at home to managed my tasks, TODOs, pet projects, shopping lists - I even keep track of the watched episodes of my favorite TV shows.
I think this goes as far as you could call me slightly obsessed with OneNote.

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So you can probably tell how annoying it was for me when OneNote recently decided to not play nice anymore and crashed every second time or so on its startup. A second or third attempt of starting it usually fixed that behavior, but it left kind of a foul taste in my mouth. What if it didn’t’ work the next time? What if that crash screwed up my synchronized notebooks? I just had a bad feeling about this behavior …

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So I decided to do some Process Monitor based investigation and found at that the last file system access before the crash happened in a directory that very much looked like OneNote’s cache.

C:\Users\<USER_NAME>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0

I figured that a cache directory might as well get deleted from time to time and just trashed it (just kidding, of course I made a backup copy first). Then I started OneNote again - and really - it had to synchronize all my Notebooks and pages again. But the crash is gone since then.

Problem solved - and once again it turns out that:

When in doubt, use Process Monitor! (Mark Russinovich)