taskbar running multiple instances of Outlook 2007

preventing multiple instances of Outlook 2007

i have Outlook 2007 pinned to my taskbar. i have notification behavior set to Hide icon and notifications. I have Outlook set to Hide When Minimized.

k, so, whenever i want to see Outlook, i simply click the pinned shortcut on taskbar. when i want to hide it, i click the same icon, and it disappears and goes back to the small pinned icon form. i repeat if i want to see outlook again....

however! doing this, i noticed that each time i click the pinned icon, it is loading a new instance of Outlook 2007.

i realized this when i saw the notifications area, and realized there were multiple Outlook 2007 windows available. (right clickign the notifications icon displays the "Open Outlook" button, not as a link, but as a menu.)


how can i prevent taskbar from loading multiple instances?

This is an issue with pinning items and then setting them to hide on minimise.

I run Outlook with the Hide on minimise but I do not pin this to the taskbar - as outlook allows you to have multiple instances (by design) the option I have to use is to open Outlook and then minimise to tray if I wish to reopen I do this from the tray.

If you wish you can add outlook to your start-up group and (as I have pin it to the Start Menu.

You can also of course add a universal keyboard shotcut to open it at will

isn't there some recycle switch method i can use?

That fixed it!

Well thanks for posting, unchecking hide when minimized actually fixed the issue for me!

Here's what I found, and also the quandary I now find myself in.

The application link for Outlook does not contain the /recycle switch so every time you click the taskbar icon, a new instance of Outlook is opened (exactly what OP describes)

Looking into solutions, I found that I could generate myself a new shortcut directly from the OUTLOOK.exe file and alter the shortcut by appending /recycle on the end. Then pinning this shortcut to my taskbar always guarantees that when I click it, it opens the existing instance of Outlook.

The problem with this is that the Windows 7 taskbar grouping won't work. Rather than opening the application on top of my shortcut, it puts it off to the right of my quick link buttons. For me, this doesn't work as I've hyper-organized my taskbar and am dependent upon the applications opening where their button exists.

So the summary is that there are 3 solutions:
1. Only re-open Outlook from the tray
2. Uncheck the "Hide When Minimized" option
3. Create a new shortcut with the /recycle switch

Overall, it doesn't seem like I get an option to meet what I would really like to do (only have 1 instance of outlook no matter where it's opened from, and also have the taskbar grouping work as expected). I'll try out not having the program hide when minimized but it just doesn't quite feel the same.

It did work.

Thank you for the reply. It did work for me.

I created a shortcut with the /recycle switch and dragged it to the taskbar, it works like a charm.