office 2007 to office 2003 retrograde, mapi32.dll outlook failure

so a user decided it would be a good idea to upgrade office because of some issue with .csv files. bad idea.

after brute forcing the removal of office with the windows install clean up tool, and reinstalling from files, rebooting and opening outlook yielded this nonsense:

Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. MAPI32.DLL is corrupt or the wrong version.

searched for a cause, and found the answer here.

it involves renaming the msmapi32.dll file in the c:\program files\common files\system\msmapi\1033 folder. i use msmapi32.dll.old as the file extension. it works best when the drive is pulled from the system and slaved to another, as the file tends to be locked by system process. once renamed, windows/office will install a new one that is 2003 compliant so then outlook will open without issue.

when outlook decides to start blocking images

it sucks.

so there is a fix i found on the internet here

There is a registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Outlook\Security. It contains a key called "OutlookSecureTempFolder". When I deleted that key, all images began to show.

note - it may not be 9, so check all the numbers