I installed Outlook 2002 on a new laptop and immediately started getting an error message that:

'A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook. Do you want to allow this? If this is unexpected, it may be a virus and you should choose "No".'

Having spent a good 20-30 hours trying to reinstall, backing up to previous images, testing various combinations of removing other software before or after the Outlook install, and various combinations of XP and Office XP updates... I found this useful Add-in (http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/security/) for Outlook called Advanced Security for Outlook. It seems to have helped a lot of people with similar problems to mine, but it did not help me.

Then I spotted this thread (https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/email/outlook-program-trying-access-your-address-book-what-all-about-7744.html) and decided to start playing around with my registry... very scary, as I am a real newbie to all this techie stuff!

Anyway, I found that stopping an Add-in from loading by changing the following registry key solved my problem: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlo ok\Addins\OutlookAddin.Connect

Now my original problem is sorted, but I would love to know what this key really does and what problems, if any, I can expect from having modified it..

This sounds like BCM, business contact manager. This is designed for business use to share and basically network a companies contacts and address book in outlook. If this is your personal machine, you should see no problems whatsoever. By the way, good job on a successful first registry edit.