In my sporadic series of IT fixes that I happen to find, here is another one about how to fix the load behavior of plugins in Outlook.
This is a solution to a problem that I have had myself with plugins for Outlook. I assume it works the same for other office programs. Basically, some plugins, in particular the Skype Meeting/Lync Meeting plugin, would not load when Outlook started and I was forced to manually enable it in the add-ons manager each time. Highly annoying. I managed to fix it by doing a small registry fix.
There is a Microsoft help article that gives the outline of the solution at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2916599
Here are the details:
- Start the registry editor in Windows
- Find the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\
- This location should have a list of add-ons or addins (the term seems to vary). Select the one that is problematic.
- Check the “LoadBehavior” value, and make sure it is set to 0x03.
- In my case, it was set to 0x02, and changing it to 0x03 fixed the problem.
I would expect the same method to work or other addins/add-ons/plugins.
I have seen some threads on the Internet where people just uninstall and reinstall the plugin, and I would expect that to achieve the same registry change in a roundabout way.
Why the load behavior changed in the first place I have no idea unfortunately.