'Salesforce for Outlook' does not load after installation and there is icon in the system tray

POSSIBLE CAUSES:

This issue could be related to a few things
 

SFO running in the Compatibility mode

After you have installed SFO, follow these steps to see if you can resolve this issue:

1. Right click on the SFO icon on your Desktop and click on Properties
2. Click on the "Compatibility" tab.
3. Under Compatibility mode, make sure the boxes for Run this program in compatibility mode for: as well as the Run this program as an administrator under Privilege Level are deselected. 

Note: SFO needs to be installed and run with the end user credentials

4. Click OK and then run SFO and see if the issue is reproducible

If Microsoft Office is reinstalled or updated while SFO is installed

Anytime you plan to uninstall, reinstall, or upgrade Microsoft Office you need to uninstall SFO first. Perform the reinstall or upgrade and then restart your computer and then reinstall SFO

If you do any of these actions without uninstalling SFO you can try checking the registry for a duplicate office key. 

Simply, check the registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00062FFF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} and delete any duplicate entries you see here. For instance, if you have Office 365 so you should only have 9.6 and so on (Please refer to this knowledge article  for more help )

Once that key is deleted, restart Outlook and SFO and see if it loads.

If this does not resolve the issue, you would need to manually clean up and reinstall Office and SFO.

To do this, follow the steps below:

Note: The order of these steps is very important if you skip a step or ignore the order, it won't work.

1. Uninstall MS Office from your Control Panel (Windows and R key combination on your keyboard to bring up the RUN command box and type in Appwiz.cpl and press enter to open the list of installed programs on your computer- You need to have local admin rights on your computer if you don't, refer to your internal help desk) and then Uninstall SFO.
2. After you install Office, use the Microsoft utility here to uninstall SFO.
3. Next apply the Full uninstall and manual clean up of 'Salesforce for Outlook' knowledge article to manually uninstall and perform a clean up for SFO from the machine.
4. Next delete the content from the %TEMP% folder.
5. Restart.
6. After you restart, download and install your Microsoft Office or ask your internal help desk to assist you with this step.
7. After you finish installing Office you need to run and install the latest updates.
8. Restart your machine again.
9. Set up your Microsoft Outlook and reactivate it if needed.
10. Login to your Salesforce and download the SFO .exe installer (Not the .MSI) and save it on your machine. Next, locale the file and right click on it and click on properties and on the General tab, make sure its not blocked, if it is then simply unblock it and click on Okay.
11. Close all applications and run it normally but make sure again you or the user who is installing has administrative permissions on the machine (refer to your internal help desk team).
12. Finish the installation and run SFO.

Corrupted Windows installation or computer image

If SFO is running normally and still no icon in the System Tray, it is possible that your installation of Microsoft Windows is corrupted or the wrong bitness of some other applications are installed on the computer.
 

1. You can navigate to Salesforce installation folder. To do this click on Start and type in %AppData%\salesforce.com\Salesforce for Outlook\logs 
2. In the Logs folder, open the Trace.log file in Notepad (or any other text editors)
3. Search for Wrong OS and you may see something like this

4. You can also check the following files in the %AppData%\salesforce.com\Salesforce for Outlook\ folder.

5. Many users upgrade their Windows from Windows 7 to 8 or from Windows 8 to 8.1 and somehow their OS bitness changes. For example, they had Windows 7 32bit (x86) and after the upgrade, they get Windows 8 64bit(x64). Our application fails to run and gets confused about the changes in the operating system and is unable to check for the OS bitness hence the wrong DLL or both DLLs (32 and 64 bit) gets dropped in the install folder. The easiest and fastest way to fix this is to reinstall Windows. You may need to reach out to your Internal Help Desk (IT Team).