Entourage 2004 Error -8738

If you’ve ever experienced error 8738 in Entourage 2004 (Microsoft Office 2004 suite) then you know how frustrating it can be. Yesterday, on my computer I got this dreaded error number. I first saw it when I tried to send an email (via our exchange server) with an attachment.

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.