Solved Outlook 2007 no longer working after Vista upgrade from Home Premium to Ultimate

I had a copy of Ultimate laying around the house and decided for some stupid reason to upgrade the OS yesterday. It's been a nightmare. After 10 hours I've reinstalled many, many programs and have been able to get the to launch all of them with the exception of Outlook. I've searched for a solution and have had no luck following a solution to the problem I'm encountering.

I'm getting the following error message:

>>> Cannot open your default e-mail folders. An unexpected error has occured. MAPI was unable to load the information service mspst.dll. Be sure the service is correctly installed and configured.<<<

I have successfully used Outlook 2007 for the past 6 months on my home PC. The problems I am encountering began immediately following the upgrade to Ultimate (32 bit--I thought I'd have less problems with drivers going 32 bit route than trying 64). I am hoping to salvage my contacts and calendar if at all possible (I have them backed up on an external drive but it's not current about 6 weeks old...I see an Outlook.pst in Windows.old but I cannot open it). I've had to reinstall Office Ultimate 2007 and I have run repair three times. All the Microsoft Windows Ultimate updates are installed. Not sure if this is related but the Office Ultimate Disc 2 will not install properly.

Any help is appreciated.

This problem was solved. I will detail the steps in case they may help anyone else who has a problem with installing Office after upgrading their OS.

Solution:

1. Uninstall Office
2. Clean the registry...I used cc Cleaner and cleaned up 30 items from the registry.
3. Reboot
4. Custom Reinstalled Office 2007 and selected "Run All From My Computer" (not sure if this was a necessary step but again, it worked for me)
5. Rebooted and viola everything including Outlook worked.

One final step to configure Outlook; I had to import the PST file that was in the AppData Folder (must unhide hidden folders to see AppData) located in
C: Windows.old>>Users>>User Name>>AppData>>Local>>>Microsoft>>>Outlook. Note Outlook is a pst file. For whatever reason, Search did not turn up this file and I was a bit worried, however, trust that your old .pst file is in this directory. In my case, I didn't care about the mail file but wanted to import my contacts and calendar. There is a way to target only the items in your outlook.pst file using File>>import/export and then select import from program/file; click next and select the Personal Folder (.pst) near the bottom...when you get to the final screen if you don't want everything to come over (you probably do) then you can select just calendar or just contacts but only one per import. In my case I did one import for contacts, and one for calendar.

If you have this problem or a similar one, I hope this helps or helped you.