I recently came across a problem on my wife's Acer laptop when trying to use Outlook 2007. In essence, it appears that the Acer eDataSecurity Outlook Add in which comes pre-installed on the laptop, breaks Outlook!
The following is the message that I received:
This application has failed to start because MSVCR80.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.
The first thing to say is that re-installing Outlook does not fix the problem and it is a waste of time (Microsoft time at that), to even attempt it.
The options are to completely uninstall Acer eDataSecurity, or just disable the Outlook Add in. As the module does lots of other things that seem to work ok, I decided to just disable the Add In. Unfortunately, you need to do this manually in the registry, but it is easy.
From the start menu of Vista, type "regedit" into the run box to open the registry editor. Browse down to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\OAddin.Addin - like the image below.
Double click the LoadBehaviour and change the key to 0 (zero) to disable the Add in.
Unfortunately as the damage has already been done to Outlook, it still won't work, so now we need to fix Outlook itself. Basically the Acer software removed or changed outlook.exe.manifest - a hidden Outlook system file. Fortunately Microsoft provides a way to fix this through built in diagnostics.
All Programs / Microsoft Office / Microsoft Office Tools / Microsoft Office Diagnostics - run this and it will say that it repaired the issue.
Although you don't need to, always worth rebooting with Microsoft. Outlook should now start!