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When you shut down Outlook, the Outlook window goes away, but the Outlook.exe process can continue to run for some time. That’s why you can see Outlook.exe sitting in Task Manager for a few minutes after closing the Outlook window. If you shut down Windows while the Outlook.exe process is still running Windows will not wait for the Outlook.exe process to exit. So, you increase the likelihood of encountering the “data file check” issue the next time you start Outlook (because the Outlook.exe process was not able to “close” your data file(s) completely before Windows was shut down). Right now, there are a few known common causes for this issue:

- Shutting down Windows before the Outlook.exe process has exited
- 3rd party add-ins improperly “closing” the data file
- Outlook crashing
- Non-Outlook process accessing the data file


Here’s to Good Karma