I customized the contact form, renamed it, published it, and used the formsadmin.exe tool to change the default contact form to the published form. But I really messed up, because now, when I click New Contact, Outlook launches an email form, not my customized contact form. How can I have Outlook go back to using the original default contact form?
The Microsoft article "How to globally change the default forms in Outlook by using the Forms Administrator utility" (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2412 35) describes the use of the FormsAdmin tool. What the tool does is modify the Windows registry, adding new subkeys to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Outlook\Custom Forms key. Microsoft released the tool only for Microsoft Office 2000, which is version 9.0 of Office. If you have a later version of Outlook, you might have used the FormsAdmin tool to export a .reg file, edited the key to replace 9.0 with 10.0 for Outlook 2002 or 11.0 for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, then imported the revised .reg file to make the change.
As the Microsoft article and the documentation for FormsAdmin point out, risks are involved with using the tool. It doesn't check whether the custom form being substituted is the appropriate type (IPM.Contact.YourPublished Form, in your case) or whether that custom form even exists. If FormsAdmin produces undesirable or unexpected results, you might want to back out the changes so you can start over.
To resolve the problem, open a registry editor and navigate to the Outlook\Custom Forms subkey that corresponds to your version of Office. You'll see subkeys for Compose and Read. Under each of those subkeys, delete the value named IPM. Contact to remove the reference to the custom form. Outlook will then open new contacts in its default contact form.