Can't access Account Settings in Outlook 2007

If you are using Outlook 2007 and have some controlling system administrators they may have locked you out of Account Settings in Outlook 2007. You will know they have locked you out because you will get a message like the following when you go to Outlook 2007 | Tools | Account Settings. This feature has been disabled by your system administrator. For more information, contact your system administrator. This is unfortunate because this is an easy place to add RSS Feeds, etc. To temporarily (until the next Group Policy refresh most likely) enable your access again there is a very easy registry change you can do. In fact, you can put the registry change in a file and just double click it to make the change. Once the change is applied you should be able to open up Outlook 2007 and go to Tools | Account Settings. The registry key you need to change is the following:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Setup\ModifyAccounts

You need to set it to 0 to enable access, and 1 to block access.

If you want to be able to just double-click a file to make the change do the following.

1. Open notepad
2. Copy and paste the following into notepad Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Setup] "ModifyAccounts"=dword:00000000
3. Save file with a .reg file extension. For example: unlockOutlook.reg

Keep in mind this is a group policy so you will likely need to make the change (or double-click the file you created) each time you want to access the Account Settings. For more great Outlook hacks check out: http://wiki.yobi.be/wiki/Outlook#All_in_one_registry_file