For some reason, every few days I'm suddenly unable to send email from Outlook 2003 via my Gmail account. This has gone on for the past several months. Sometimes I can resolve it by restarting Outlook. Usually, I can only solve it by entirely rebooting my computer. That's a pain, but rebooting has given me a hint to the problem -- ThorConnWndClass.

When rebooting after one of these Gmail send failures, I finally noticed I was often getting the same error message that came up. I've lost the piece of paper where I wrote down exactly what the error said, but it involved something like being unable to close ThorConnWndClass.

I finally did some research on the issue. Searches on the topic bring up a number of people reporting problems, though many aren't clear about what ThorConnWndClass is.

For example, this page pointed me over to ThorConnWndClass & Outlook at the Windows XP forum on CNET, where someone else was having email sending problems. In that case, he was told to remove his screensaver.

Over at PC Review's forums, a thread there recommended removing the Alternative User Input from my Office installation, as a way of getting rid of ThorConnWndClass and related problems.

OK, I decided to give that a go today. To do so, I:

• Went to Control Panel
• Selected Add or Remove Programs
• Selected the Change button for Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003
• Scrolled down to Office Shared Features section when the Microsoft Office 2003 Setup window appeared
• Marked the entire Alternative User Input option as not available. Since I don't use Speech or Handwriting input, this is no loss.
• Rebooted

Result? No luck with Gmail. No instead of my messages sitting in my inbox and failing to go out, they still sat there and this time gave me the famous 0x800CCC7D error I've written about before.

Perhaps the ThorConnWndClass problem and the 0x800CCC7D are unrelated -- two separate Gmail issues I've dealt with before that hit me today, a double-whammy. I certainly know others are probably having the 0x800CCC7D [problem recently, because I can see traffic to my page on that topic has suddenly picked up.

Solution? I did what I posted before about good old 0x800CCC7D, which is to delete your Gmail account settings in Outlook and recreate the account. That solved it -- and hopefully the other problem with ThorConnWndClass also will be gone.

Meanwhile, the gang at Threadwatch discover the Gmail Custom From problem. Yeah, that was number 18 on my 25 Things I Hate About Google list earlier this year. For those not aware of this problem, see my Gmail's "Custom From" System Messed Up By "On Behalf Of" Headers. And then feel sad, because the only way to fix it is if Google fixes it.

Come on, Gmail engineers. I love the product. Lots of us do. These are complaints out of love. We want it to get better, and constant send and receive problems or poor handling of the Custom From field are big turnoffs.

And yes, the remove all spam feature that is rolling out is great -- except for the paranoid who want to review items before trashing them. So could we please, please, please have the option to view more than 100 items at a time that I've wished for?

I just killed 642 items in spam that have built up over the past two days. That required me loading up seven pages to review them all before killing, to make sure nothing good got held by mistake (only one item was incorrectly tagged as spam, so great work!).

 If I could have skimmed 250 or 500 items, it would save a lot of clicks. Do your part to help prevent Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and reduce clicks with a view more than 100 option, please.

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