Microsoft Entourage For Mac Database Daemon Fatal Error

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The desktop as of last night now has a pop up with the following message when Microsoft Entourage is launched. 'Database daemon fatal error' Entourage shuts down once tyne message has been acknowledged. Apr 19, 2018 The first time that you open Entourage, a new 'Microsoft User Data' folder is created in the Documents folder that is provided by the Mac operating system. The Microsoft User Data folder contains an Office 2008 Identities folder that stores the Entourage database for each identity. To create a new Microsoft User Data folder, follow these steps. Oct 01, 2009  Just rebuild the database by holding down the option key when starting Entourage Also please post future MS Office related questions on Microsoft's own forums for their Mac products as Apple discussions only provide support for Apple products.

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Download updates from Office Mac or use AutoUpdate under Help in the menu bar. More Info on updates

Jun 12, 2009 My Microsoft Entourage is suffering from “Database Daemon Fatal Error” Posted in Tools by petermoelgaard on June 12, 2009 Now its been two times in three days I have had to run the Database Utility which is shipped and installed together with Microsoft Office for MAC 2008. Microsoft Entourage is an efficient and is widely accepted personal information manager and E-mail client for the Mac OS X operating system. It is considered as very reliable as compared to other popular mail applications as it helps to save your significant data in the database.

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Find Solutions for Crashes, Conflicts and General Problems

  • Be sure to read Basics everyone should know about using Entourage and Outlook
  • For help isolating the source of the problem, see Troubleshooting Basics
  • Read User Experiences for the unusual solutions

For specific help with Entourage 2008 see Get Started with Entourage 2008, Bugs in Entourage 2008

Outlook for Mac Help

Signs & Symptoms for Entourage Users

  1. Attachments
    1. 'For your security Entourage will block submission of this form' (Entourage 2008 )
  2. Bugs, conflicts and general problems:
  3. Crashes, Stalls and Quits
    1. Launching Entourage bounces in Dock and then quits
    2. Multiple applications quit unexpectedly or fail to launch
  4. Database and Identity
  5. Errors
  6. Exchange Users: see Exchange FAQs and Troubleshooting
  7. Fonts: see Text
  8. IMAP Accounts
  9. Install or Import click here to troubleshoot
    1. HOW INSTALLING APPLE'S UPDATES CAN RENDER YOUR MAC UNBOOTABLE AND HOW YOU CAN PREVENT IT (article on Unsanity's site)
  10. Messages or Mail
  11. Performance Issues/memory managment
    1. Exchange accounts - read this article Optimize Entourage to better work
  12. Rebuild
  13. Rules click here to troubleshoot
  14. Send & Receive click here to troubleshoot
    1. Update to ATT for BellSouth users results in not being able to send & receive.
  15. Sync Services click here to troubleshoot
  16. Text or Font
    1. Office 2008 Font Basics (installing both 2008 & 2004)
  17. Time, Daylight Saving Time Update
  18. Updates
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Signs & Symptoms for Intel-based Macs

Solutions for general Entourage Users

1. Corrupt Database:

If your database if corrupt, rebuild your database. To salvage data see Corrupt Database Fixes

2. Delete Bad Message

Check for a bad message:

  1. A malformed spam message was sent to many people causing the Junk Mail Filter in Entourage to fail. This is now fixed. Download updates.
  2. One new trick starting with Entourage 2004 is that you can start it up from default settings - i.e. with Send & Receive All schedule OFF (Manual only) - by holding down the Shift key at startup - like 'Extensions Off' when starting up your Mac. This allows Entourage to launch without crashing in situations like this. You could then turn off Preview Pane and check the server looking for the suspect message.
    1. If you have POP accounts, you'd do it by using your Webmail account or use Allow Online Access in the Options window of the account settings. Next, select the server icon now appearing in the Folders List and turn off Preview Pane.
    2. If IMAP, Exchange or Hotmail just check your Inbox and folders affected with Preview Pane turned off.

Delete the message (which actually marks it for Deletion from the server), connect to the server (Send & Receive All).

3. Turn on Dock: Notifications crashed when Dock is turned off: If you have turned off your Dock, Notifications will crash. Put the dock back so that it starts at login.

4. Turn off 'Truncate long recipients list'.More info

5. Check for duplicate daemons.

You should have only one Microsoft Database daemon in your 'Startup items'. If you have more than one, delete all and let Entourage create a new one when it launches.

6. Fails to Launch:

Intel-based Mac: Microsoft Office doesn't launchIf you install Motion 2.1, part of Final Cut Studio 5.1, or other applications that use 'split segment' non-system libraries on an Intel-based Mac, then Microsoft Office applications may fail to launch.

7. Entourage automatically launches: Check for some third-party applications that schedule events. MenuCalendarClock can launch Entourage every time it checks for events (whether or not you have set are any events for Entourage). Other possible culprits: EntourageABMenu, Quicksilver, LaunchBar, iKey, Keyboard Maestro.

8. Yellow envelope on dock icon does not go away. User reports that disabling Menufela Application Enhancer solved the problem.

9. Constant reminder that 'Your Office database is damaged. You need to rebuild'

The 'Verify database' has been known to give false reports. One option that can cause these false reports is a corrupted preference. Try deleting this preference file in your User's --> Library Preferences:

To see if the background verify option is giving a false report, try running the Database Utility and having it do a verify operation. If it gives you a clean bill of health, you know you are safe in turning off the background checking.

Some users have had to uncheck this preference to stop the constant warnings. If you are not experiencing any problems turn off the 'Verify database'. I do recommend that you run regular backups of your database. Use Tasks to set up a reminder.

Other options to check:

  1. Bad RAM.
  2. Being low on disk space. To check your disk space, use the Activity Monitor. Click on Disk Usage in the bottom menu bar and select the volume where you have Office installed. You can also use Disk Utility to see detailed information about a disk or volume. To learn more, open Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities folder and refer to Disk Utility Help.

10. Entourage quits in Rebuild screen before I can choose an option.

There could be a conflict with another application. Try restarted with Shift key down to quit remaining processes. Now try to Rebuild Entourage.

11. Receive I/O error when I try to rebuild.

I/O error almost always means disk damage.

12. Word, Excel & PowerPoint crash at startup. Crash log shows Blame Module Name: CoreFoundation.

Hold Shift key down when launching. This will clear the Office Font Cache (12) file

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13. Crashes of undetermined origin. When there is no clear culprit, check these solutions:

  1. Check for third party conflicts: Haxies can cause problems. Notifications crashes have stopped after disabling WindowShade or FruitMenu. iListen is known to cause problems with menus and shortcuts. Disable any haxies you might have installed and see if the problems go away.
  2. Check for dual languages: Check the 'Text Encoding' (similar name translated into your language) folder within the System Folder, you may have duplicated items there (one set in English and another one in your own language). If so, keep the set in your OS language and trash the other one. Doing so solves many problems with Entourage, Explorer and Outlook.

14. Time Zone Bug: There is a bug that appeared around the time of the switch to DST (Daylight Saving Time). The problem manifests itself as a yellow banner across the top of an event in Entourage that states that the event is scheduled in a different time zone to your computer's time zone. It appears to be a conflict between 'PST' & 'PDT' timezones. The correction has occurred, and events are displayed in the right time slot, but the banner is displayed when it shouldn't be.

This bug is fixed with update Office 2004 11.3.3. For Office X and 2001 users see this article 'Is your Mac Ready for Daylight Saving Time?'

15. Identity has disappeared from hard drive: Entourage opens with new blank Identity. This is normally a user error (see below), but if the Identity has disappeared, a possible culprit is your anti-virus application. Some versions identify a virus within the database and puts your database into quarantine. You will need to read the directions on how to release.

Check any AV products you are running and, if necessary, exclude the Microsoft User Data folder from their scans.

ClamXav has an option to move infected files to trash . Be sure to uncheck this.

Also see this solution in User Experiences where the database is in an invisible folder 'lost & found'.

15a. Entourage opens with a new blank Identity.

Most likely you have accidentally moved your data. Hopefully, you have not deleted the file. If you have deleted the trash, it's gone. Sorry!

Select Switch Identity and see if your old identity is still listed.

Entourage expects the folder to be in your Documents folder. For OS X users, that's the Documents folder in your User's folder.

To find your old database, search for 'Microsoft User Data' (without the quotes).

If you have not used a new identity in Entourage, then copy the entire Microsoft User Data folder to the correct location.

Fix if you have more than one Microsoft User Data Folder..

Move the entire identity folder you want to use to the Office Identities folder that Entourage is recognizing. Your identity is named 'Main' by default. Be sure to rename one so you do not overwrite. Your identity folder can contain more than one identity. Switch Identities to view your old mail. If you have not used the new identity, delete it. If you have used it and want to combine the new mail with your original database, drag each folder to the desktop from one identity. This creates an MBOX file. Switch identities. Drag the MBOX files into the folder window of Entourage.

You can delete the old folder after you are satisfied with the transfer.

16 Stalling, freezing, slow switching between windows

Sometimes linking can cause slowdowns. For example in the Address Book: Once it opens, click on the name column to re-sort your contacts. That should cause Entourage to re-sort the list and speed things up.

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18. Text is gibberish..HTML Email not formatted correctly

Quit Entourage. Delete these files in Users/[YourUserName]/Library/Caches. Restart Entourage.

  • com.microsoft.browserfont.cache
  • tasmanbrowser.cache

If the above does not work, check for corrupt font caches. These can easily be cleared from the system with Font Finagler. Download and run the application. First click the 'Inspect Font Cache Files' button, then the 'Clean Font Cache Files' button. You must then restart your Mac. Other utilities that can clear your font caches are Cocktail, FontNuke and OnyX.

More info: Font Management in OS X Tiger and Panther

19. Receive the error 'unable to find download.microsoft.com.. when you try to download updates for Office.

If Comcast is the ISP provider they are having a problem with the DNS servers. The fix is to go to the TCP/IP and enter 68.87.64.196 then on the next line type 68.87.66.196. Click apply and go back to the Microsoft Mactopia download page and get the update.

20) Calendar fonts in Entourage 2008 not readable

Try disabling font Curlz MT

Use Font Book. You can find it in your Applications folder. Open the application, scroll down to Curlz MT, then choose Edit>Disable 'Curlz MT' family. Restart your computer to force it to rebuild its font caches, and see if the problem has gone.

21) Messages with an attachment creates Error -5000

Attachments are stored in the Entourage Temp folder inside the Microsoft User Data folder. This is where Entourage is trying to save the file before it opens. Check the permissions on this folder.

  • Owner Access: Read Write
  • Group Access: Read only
  • Others: Read only

You can delete the Entourage Temp folder, and Entourage will create a new one when launched.

22) Problems with e-mail fonts.

Delete the 'com.microsoft.browserfont.cache' file in ~/Library/Caches.More help with fonts.

also see garbled fonts..text is gibberish

24) Sounds stop working.

First check Entourage --> Preferences 'Notification'. Make sure that the appropriate sounds are checked. Click the speaker icon next to them to test your sound setup .If you can hear sounds from other applications, but not the Entourage sounds have a look at this Apple Knowledge Base article.

An application may have set your audio output settings too high. If that fails and you have GarageBand, try opening and closing it.

Entourage 2008 installed 12.0.0 version has a bug with sounds. Update to 12.0.1 or higher to fix.

27) Message stuck in Outbox which is causing Entourage to stop responding, forcing a Force Quit.

Launch Entourage holding down the Shift key. In Entourage 2004, this disables schedules from launching at startup. This will let you enter Entourage and delete the message.

28) Mail Moving to wrong folder

It is most likely a Mailing List Manager entry that has accidentally been created.

These entries are all to easy to make by mistake when marking an item as 'Not Junk' because of some ambiguous wording in that dialog.

Check that there are no entries that shouldn't be there in the 'Mailing List Manager' under the 'Tools' menu. Check destination folder in all of your Mailing List Manager and Custom rules.

29) Disappearing/reappearing messages on IMAP account.

Unfortunately, Entourage seems to have some issues keeping its message list in sync with the actual mail store on IMAP accounts. Force a message list synchronization (Command-Option-L) and the message returns.

30) Unexpected Quits

  • Try repairing Disk Permissions: Open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities), select your hard disk volume in the left pane, click the First Aid tab, then click Repair Disk Permissions.
  • Simply updating to a newer version of Mac OS X may resolve issues with unexpected quits. Re-applying the latest combo updater from Apple can also overwrite potentially problem causing files.
  • Re-install Office from original media then updating can resolve issues with unexpected quits. Use 'Remove Office' first. Be sure to see on this link the files that are not removed using Remove Office in Office 2008 and will need to removed manually.
  • Delete .plist files: Unexpected quits -- especially those that occur after a major Mac OS X update -- can be solved by deleting corrupt .plist files. Preferences can be found in your User's Library/Preferences folder:
    • com.microsoft.OfficeNotifications.plist
    • com.microsoft.DatabaseDaemon.plist
    • com.microsoft.Entourage.plist
    • Microsoft folder
    • com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
  • Caches: In some cases, unexpected quits an other issues can be resolved by deleting specific system caches.
    • Try deleting files that start with 'com.apple.LaunchServices' from the /Library/Caches folder.
    • A corrupted font cache may be causing Unexpected Quits. The font caches are located in User>Library>Preferences>Microsoft>Office Font Cache.
  • Control-Click (Right-Click) causes unexpected quit, Crashes upon right-click are usually associated with 3rd-party contextual menu items.

31a) Entourage quits when Preferences are opened

This is a rare problem. One user found that re-install of Office fixed the problem.

31) Some Events Display Incorrectly after recent OS and MS updates:

1) Try changing the time zone in the event (under the options menu on the toolbar). All older recurring events lost the time zone after DST. When set to the proper time zone, they should appear correctly in the calendar.

2) A good old fashioned reboot has cleared up similar issues.

3) All events must have a start time. For all day events, the start time is 00:00am.

4) The following was posted on the Entourage Talk List by Jeremy Reichman Senior Desktop Systems Engineer, Information and Technology Services, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Hopefully, the following will answer some of the questions involving problems with the DST patches.

In our experience (and we did quite a bit of testing at my site), whenever you used a unpatched Windows/Outlook system or a pre-11.3.3 version Entourage to create an event (at least for Exchange calendaring), you will need to fix those events' data _after_ patching.

The DST patches for Exchange clients, in our testing, did not fix data saved prior to patching. However, reading how clients save to Exchange calendars, this did not surprise us.

The patches did, however, fix _new_ events saved to Exchange calendars after patching the client.

5) If your events are on an Exchange server then that means your Exchange Server admins have not yet patched their Exchange Servers.

Part of the patching process will be to run a utility that will essentially alter all calendar events in every account by one hour. Any meeting invitations you have received and accepted will be resent to you and you'll need to reaccept them.

If the above describes your situation then do not alter your events' times. They'll be wrong after the server patching.

6) Check list. (please report back with your setup on the newsgroup if you continue to have problems)

  1. Version info (DST fix requires update to Microsoft Office to 11.3.3 or higher.)
  2. What version of OS X?
  3. What's the OS X time zone?
  4. What's the time zone and dst rule in the problematic event(s) (drag to desktop and look at the DST and timezone info in the iCal part)
  5. What's the default time zone in Entourage.
  6. Are these events in an Exchange mailbox that is accessed by Outlook also?
  7. Do you have any events between March 11 and April 1, 2007, that show this problem?
  8. Do you have any events between October 28 and November 4, 2007, that show this problem?

32) Unable to be open attachments with either Word or Excel.

Are they being sent by Office 2007 on a windows machine? If so, they may be in the new 'docx' (.xlsx) format which isn't (yet) readable by Office:mac (although it can be read by openoffice) [as of Office v 11.3.4 conversion has not been added, MS has not released date for a compatibility pack for Office Mac]

Microsoft introduced the open XML file format with Office 2007. For more info see Microsoft KB 924074 and Brian Jones: Open XML Formats Blog for more help with the new format. As a result, Office files have new extensions:

Word: .docx (instead of .doc)
Excel: .xlsx (instead of .xlsx)
PowerPoint: .pptx (instead of .ppt)

33) Entourage won't open PDF in Acrobat. We have setup our Open With preferences in the Mac OS to open all PDFs with Acrobat and this works fine if we double-click on a PDF file on our computer or servers. However, we are having problems with some PDFs attached to emails in Entourage showing a generic icon and they will not open in Acrobat, Preview is launched instead.

Trash com.apple.launchservices.plist. It is located in the User’s folder/Preferences. Reset the Open with settings for PDFs to open in Acrobat.

34) Corrupt Attachments Received

Check to see if you partially downloaded message. Some attachments are corrupted during transfer. Try to get another copy.

35) Hotmail accounts for Entourage X users are now inaccessible.

Hotmail accounts are inaccessible for Entourage X users after a recent server update on April 1, 2007. This also affects users on IE in Mac OS 9 and older versions of Outlook for PC users. The only option is to upgrade to Entourage 2004 or use your web access. Sorry!

36) Emails sent to me from Outlook PC's that contain a smiley face show up as a 'j' instead of the smiley face symbol.

It will be a character encoding issue. Outlook is not very good at properly defining which character set is used in creating a message.

Simply go to the format menu and under character set select 'Western European (Windows)' and things should display correctly.

If this is a recurring problem, set up a mail rule to change the character set of every message received from this sender as it is received.

See these rules for examples: Dealing with mail from PC Users.

37) Dates all wrong after import or IMAP account cache was empted (shows as time imported)

You can select 'Sent' rather than 'Received' to show the time, or get Barry Wainwright's script called 'Correct the Date' available here:

This will reset the 'time sent' of a received message to the time of the first 'received' header (which should be within a few seconds of when the message was actually sent).

38) When I view my e-mails, my date is in some other language and not English. This only happens on my view screen.

Entourage uses the date format specified in the System Preferences (International prefpane > Formats). You should make sure that all formats in there are according to what you want (short date, medium and long dates..).

39) All or some Microsoft Office applications are completely missing after applying the Office 2004 11.3.5 updater.

In most cases, when installation of an update fails part-way through, with the installer either quitting unexpectedly in the accompaniment of an error message or exhibiting an indefinite hang necessitating a force-quit, the result is all or some of the Microsoft Office applications are completely missing.

The only remedy is to re-install Office from your CD and update. I suggest stuffing the Office folder prior to updating in case the update fails again. If the update fails a second time, update to 11.3.3. I was unable to find the 11.3.4 updater. MS removes previous updaters when they post a combo updater like 11.3.5.

FWIW, this is not a MS specific problem. It can happen with any update process.

40) Unable to install Updates

There is no one solution for this problem. See Update Errors and fixes specific fixes for updating and installing Office 2008.

  • One user reported he discovered his hard drive was having significant problems. Running a disk repair fixed those problems and now allows for the install of update 11.3.6.
  • You might need to download the latest combo updater from Apple and run it again rather than using Software Update. Doing so overwrites potentially problem-causing files. Several users have reported this fixed some odd problems they were having. Combo updaters will install on the same version as they’re applying—no need to roll back or do a clean install.
  • Another option is to use “Remove Office”, then install from the CD and update.
  • Other users have found that an “Archive & Install” of the OS was required.

As evidenced by the above options, this indicates underlying problems with your files that are causing the update to fail.

41) Collapse triangle doesn't always work.

This is a known issue in Entourage 2004.There is a bug that keeps the disclosure triangles in groups from working if the first column in the View > Columns menu is disabled. In mail views, the first column is Links, so that column has to be turned on for the triangles to work. In newsgroup views, the first column in the list is 'Online Status,' so that column needs to enabled for the triangles to work.

42) Long startup times for Office applications to open.

Adobe Acrobat 6 PDF toolbars have created problems in Office v.X and 2004. Problems range from long (e.g., 5 minute) startup times, to crashes. These toolbars are installed by default by Acrobat using add-ins.

For the fix see JE McGimpsey's Preventing conflicts with the PDF toolbar

43) Entourage broken time zone support with Sync Services when installed on case-sensitive filesystem.

One user reports problems with time zone support syncing on a Unix server.

In Entourage, there are two files that create a problem when using a case-sensitive filesystem:

  • timezones.xml is called as Timezones.xml
  • utc is called UTC

To fix this,

  1. cd /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office (or the appropriately situated place on your machine)
  2. ln -s timezones.xml Timezones.xml
  3. ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /usr/share/zoneinfo/utc
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Microsoft Entourage For Mac Database Daemon Fatal Error Entourage Imac

44) Problems after installing Leopard

1) Crash if click font color button

Instead of telling our young people to plan ahead, we should tell them to plan to be surprised. Language packs and language interface packs are not available at this time.If you have already installed Office for Mac and you wish to use it in a different language, you’ll need toand then install it using the download site mentioned above. Office for Mac 2011 is available in the following languages: English French German Italian Spanish Danish Dutch Finnish Swedish Norwegian Polish Russian Chinese Simplified Chinese Traditional JapaneseYou can download Office for Mac 2011 in the language of your choice by clicking the link below, clicking Get Started, and providing your Office 2011 product key:It is not possible to change the language of the Office for Mac user interface (menu items, buttons, or other interface elements) or Help contentwithout reinstalling the software. Microsoft office mac torrent.

Remove this font cache file:

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (11)

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45) Hundreds of windows open in Entourage.

Delete the preference file, manually close each window then rebuild the database.

~Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Entourage Preferences

Entourage 2008 now allows users to Option-click on the red close button

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46) Office 2008 slow to launch

Fonts seem to be a common culprit. I suggest first testing in your User's folder and marking the time. Then Go to System Preferences --> Create a New User in Accounts. Switch to the New User by logging out/in or use Fast User Switching. Test Office there. Testing in a clean environment will quickly eliminate problems in your User's folder.

  • Disable global auto font activation from within Suitcase. Easy way to test if Suitcase is part of the problem: Simply quit Suitcase and test launch.
  • Delete 100% of the Microsoft prefs and the .dotm/Normal file, then restart. Easy way to test this would be to create a new User in System Preferences and test there.
  • Disable the 'what you see is what you get' font menus. Go to Entourage > Preferences, and then, under 'General Preferences', click 'General' in the left pane. Uncheck the box for 'WYSIWYG font menu'. That will disable the preview of what the fonts look like in the Font menu, but it should appear faster as a result. --Mickey Stevens
  • If an Office application is 'Not Responding' during startup, test using the Activity Monitor., Check to CPU to see if another application is out of control. On user found that disabling FontAgent Pro solved the problem.
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47) Slow switching to the Calendar.

Possible culprit: flagged messages (flagged messages are now considered a type of 'to-do', by the way.) One user reports, At one point I had about 2000, and would get stuck for 5-6 minutes. I unflagged most of them, but I still have a couple hundred, They now slow me down to about 30 seconds switching to calendar and then flagging messages.

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48) Beachballitis .. the beachball spins and spins and spins and ....

Beachballitis happens when you're running with too little memory for what you're doing. Which means that in general the situation you're describing IS happening but not to things you can deal with but with the Virtual Memory system. What you describe can happen when the memory system is constantly having to unload from and load into memory from the disk drive.

Have you run Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder? And have you watched the value for Free when the System Memory tab (at the bottom) is selected. From what I've seen when this number gets below 50MB the system will start to slow down. When it gets down to 20MB or 10MB you get what you call Beachballitis.

They only real cure is to run fewer programs or buy more memory.

Now if you're leaving your system running for days at a time and also not quiting programs you might be running into a situation where one or more of the common programs you use 'leaks' memory. This means it doesn't release memory when done with it and over time will consume more and more memory. Which can lead to the shortage noted above. And the only cure is to quit the program and at times restart the computer to get things back to a decent state. posted by David Ross on TidBITS talk.

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49) Entourage crashes when attempting to set a reminder date.

Microsoft Entourage For Mac Database Daemon Fatal Error Free

User reports: I have finally resolved this issue. Setting the date to default in the system preferences fixed it. I had a custom setting and it appears that Entourage can't handle custom date settings. The custom setting was very simple dd-mm-yy!