Running application in XP Mode and Outlook

Question

I have a legacy Windows XP application that I am trying to support. I have been able to set it up to run as an XP-Mode application. The problem I have is that this application is able to create emails to send invoices to customers. I have MS-Outlook 2007 installed on the virtual machine and the problem is that while the email is created, if Outlook is not running then the emails will sit in Outlooks Outbox until Outlook is running on the virtual machine.

They way I have overcome this so far is to get the user to log in to the Virtual machine and run the application from there. I have added Outlook to the users StartUp folder. And this work if you start the XP virtual machine but not work when running the application as an "XP Mode Application". Anything in the users startup folder does not seem to get executed.

One thought was to set up outlook to run as a service on the virtual machine in the hope that it would automatically do the sending of the emails, but somehow that just feels wrong.

Is there anyway that I can get the emails to send

Answer 1

Is the legacy app using COM to talk to Outlook or is it executing a mailto: handler? If the latter, you could change the handler.

If it is indeed COM, then that's another can of worms all together.