Here are some symptoms I saw after getting that error message:

1. Safari – Web pages don’t display. You’ll just get a blank screen.
2. Internet Explorer – Crashes when launched.
3. Entourage 2004 – Can’t send attachments, some emails will say, “This message may not be displayed properly because it contains an unknown character set.” You might also see that you can’t save Calendar items in Entourage.

Before experiencing this error I ran Monolingual to free up some hard drive space (Garage Band is HUGE) since I’m down to 6.5 gb.

After searching Google for about 30 minutes I realized that it was due to Monolingual deleting or basically messing up my Text Encoding files. Official wording was, “damaged or incorrect version of Text Encodings files or the Text Encoding Converter extension.”

Now I don’t know what text encoding files or the converter does, but it definitely messed things up. I ran disk repair and repaired permissions. I pulled my text files off of my MacBook Pro DVD. They were in System > Library > Core Services > Encodings. That didn’t help either.

Then I tried to reinstall Office, that didn’t work either. I then deleted every preference file for Office and Entourage I could find…nothing. Still got the -8738 error.

I was forced to reinstall 10.4 and I had just done it two days ago, how frustrating!

I did and “Archive and Install” and chose to save my user files. It was amazing!

All of my settings and documents were as they were before the reinstall, but now everything was working!

So if you get a 8738 error in Microsoft Office Entourage, Archive and Reinstall! Oh ya, and bookmark this site.

This error code usually indicates that the file you are trying to open needs to be opened by a program in the trash. If the program usually used for opening this file is not in the trash, you may have deleted it.

You can try to put the program back in the applications folder, or you can use the Get Info (apple + i) screen to change the program that opens that file. Sometimes this will happen with a Microsoft Word document (.doc) when you have two versions of Microsoft Word (OS9 and OS X version).

Apple Happy Staff