Outlook crashes when adding a telephone number to a contact

There appears to be a bug in Outlook that causes the program to freeze and crash when trying to add or edit a telephone number on a contact. After a lot of researching different methods of trying to cure this problem, taken from various forums and websites, as there seem to be a lot of people out there having the same issue, I found that most people did not solve their issue and could not fathom what was causing the crash. What I did find has worked for me and others that have had the same issue and it is very simple to implement.

Firstly you need to go to your Control Panel and if not already, switch it to classic view so you can see the Phone and Modem options:

Open up the Phone and Modem options and you will get a window like the one below:

All you need to do then is to enter your telephone Area Code into the appropriate box and then click Apply / OK. This information is usually asked for and filled in when first installing the operating system on a machine but more often than not it is skipped or the machine has the operating system preinstalled.

Next you just need to restart your Outlook and then you should be able to add a telephone number to a new contact or edit an existing contact without it freezing and crashing, assuming your problem was caused by this.

Original Authors: M.A.Harris
Edit Update Authors: R.N
Updated On: 15/04/2009