A Weird Little Quirk with Windows 7, Outlook 2007 and NormalEmail.dotm

One of those “get this fix into Google” blog posts… running Outlook 2007 on Windows 7 Beta, whenever i close Outlook I get this error message:

Outlook cannot save or create this file. Make sure that the disk you want to save the file on is not full, write-protected, or damaged. (C:\NormalEmail.dotm)

It’s actually trying to create NormalEmail.dotm under

C:\Users\user.name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\

but for some reason I don’t understand, after installing Office 2007 on Windows 7, there’s a weird 100Kb file called simply “Templates” – no extension - in C:\Users\user.name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\. It doesn’t do anything as far as I can tell, but it means Outlook can’t create the Templates\ folder because there’s already a file by that name in the AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\ folder. Deleting this file doesn’t appear to hurt anything, and once it’s gone, Outlook happily shuts down without complaint.

That’s been bugging me for weeks, so I’ll bet you it’s fixed in yesterday’s Office 2007 Service Pack 2, or the Windows 7 Release Candidate that’s due out tomorrow… but if it’s not, then this is how I fixed it :)