>Does anyone know how to programmatically retrieve all of the categories from the Outlook Master Category List including those added by the user? I can retrieve categories for a specific contact or appointment if one or more categories have been selected. However, I'm needing to get to the Master Category List. Anybody done this before that would like to enlighten me?

Whew, this took a while to figure out. The Master Category List, including categories added by the user is stored as binary in the registry. Using the Windows Scripting Host (WSH), you can read this value

DIMENSION laTest[1]
* read hex values into array
WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
laTest = WshShell.RegRead("HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Categories\MasterList")
lcString = ''
FOR i = 1 TO (ALEN(laTest) - 2) STEP 2 && skip every 2nd character since it is a space
    * convert ascii code to character
    lcString = lcString + CHR(laTest(i))
ENDFOR
? lcString