Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Invalid XML, the view cannot be loaded.

I had a customer call me to say that his computer seemed to freeze for him, so he did a hard restart on it. Once it booted back up, Microsoft Outlook 2010 would not start but give the following error message.

Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window. Invalid XML, the view cannot be loaded.

Starting Outlook in safe mode didn’t work either. Fortunately the fix is really easy.

If you are on Windows 7 simply type the following command in the search or run box.

Outlook.exe /ResetNavPane

Bingo. You will be up and running again!

Thanks to itswapshop.com for the tip.