Yesterday, I was using an existing program on a new Windows 7 computer and when it was trying to send an email through Outlook, I was receiving the following error
Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {0006F03A-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following error: 80080005.
I tried it on my development machine (also Windows 7), and found that it worked fine. Then I noticed that if I didn’t have Outlook loaded before trying to send the email, it seemed to work. I realised that I was running my program as Administrator to temporarily work around some permissions problems, and that when Outlook was loaded normally, it was running as the normal logged in user. I tried loading Outlook as Administrator and it worked fine, so I sorted out the permissions problem and turned off “run as Administrator” in the compatibility section of the program’s shortcut properties. It still worked fine. It looks like COM can’t operate between different users, which I suppose makes sense.
There may be other problems that can cause this same exception though – a quick search gave me a few other possible problems and solutions.