Windows Live Mail error 0x80041161

Dad is working with his father-in-law who has an issue with his Suddenlink web-mail-based “forwarding” handling of messages.

Seems that (and the behavior is not browser dependent) when he tries to forward a message from his web-based email client, the message body text disappears.  File size remains large so it seems to still have the forwarded “content” somewhere in the message body, but it just can’t be seen.  Checks on the sent message find the content isn’t visible either to the recipient.  Strange.

Anyway, that’s not the immediate issue.

Rather than keep banging our heads on the page coding interaction with the browsers, I suggested we hook him up with a local email client and move away from the web-client interface.  No small challenge for the old-timer.

Knowing there is a plethora of good/free email clients out there (I personally prefer Mozilla Thunderbird at home) I suggested to Dad we do a test-run with the gentleman using Windows Live Mail.  I’ve personally had great success with migrating others who are technically challenged from a web-mail based interface to this program.  The interface isn’t too “techie” and the basic email operations are covered with pretty intuitive icons on the main ribbon tab. Everything a very basic email user needs in a nice GUI.

Suddenlink even provides a handy guide for setting up their email accounts in WLM: Windows 7 - Email Configuration

But before we did a remote-rollout on his system, I wanted to play around with WLM again myself using a few of my “zombie” email accounts for testing (you know…those email accounts you have signed up for a long time ago, almost never use, but keep around as a honeypot for fun email spam flies?).

So when I fired up the WLM client on my laptop, I was surprisingly greeted by an error dialog box saying it couldn’t be launched.

windows live mail could not be started. it may not be installed correctly. make sure that your disk is not full or that you are not out of memory. (0x80041161)

A quick Google led me to this link: windows live mail error 0x80041161 - Microsoft Answers

I went to my Win 7’s system “search field” in my start-menu and typed in “wlarp.exe”. It showed up in the list.

On my Windows 7 (x64) system the location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Installer\wlarp.exe

Launched it. It ran for a while and finished.

Re-launching Windows Live Mail resulted in normal launch and operation with no more errors and allowed me to set up my test accounts for practice before deployment and training begins.

Nice to know.

Now let the real work begin….

Cheers.

--Claus V.