If you discover you are unable to accept or decline tasks, the likely cause is a failed update.

The Security Update for Outlook 2003, released on January 10, 2006 and described in Knowledge Base article 892843, is reported to cause problems when accepting assigned tasks or updating completed tasks on the sender’s tasks list. This security update may also cause some VBA and scripts to fail.

Not everyone who installs this update is affected and later updates may fix it, so go ahead and install it, but if you experience problems opening or accepting tasks, with tasks updates, you’ll need to uninstall the update. You can do this through Control Panel, Add and Remove Programs.

Those who have problems have two or more copies of this update installed for some reason and there doesn’t seem to be a problem if only one copy of the patch is installed so it only affects a small percentage of Outlook users. Keep in mind that removing the update will not fix tasks that were affected, but all new tasks should work correctly in the future.

To uninstall the update(s), go to Add/Remove Programs and click the “show updates” checkbox. The update should be listed under the entry for Microsoft Office 2003. Click Remove to uninstall. If tasks work correctly, you can reinstall the update along with the hotfix found in KB 913695, if you desire. As long as only one copy is installed it should work as expected.

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Last reviewed on Aug 22, 2011