Category Archives: Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010/2007 stuck in disconnected state for one user

Ran into a problem today with an Outlook 2010 client that would not leave the “disconnected” state. I restarted the computer, verified the mailbox was still active in Exchange 2003, and verified that this problem was not effecting other users, even ones on the same PC. I tried to create a new outlook profile, but during the setup I kept getting the same error:

“Microsoft Exchange Server reported error: The server is
not available. Contact your administrator if this condition persists”

It appears that just this one user cannot connect to exchange, the way that we solved this problem was by increasing the maximum number of connections that each user can make to Exchange 2003. Follow these steps on your Exchange server:

  1. Open Regedit
  2. Navigate to HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MicrosoftExchangeIS\ParametersSystem
  3. Create a new DWORD called “Maximum Allowed Sessions Per User” and set it to decimal 64.
  4. Restart the “Microsoft Exchange Information Store” service
  5. Attempt to reconnect with the user’s outlook.

Hopefully this took care of your problem user.

 

Outlook 2010 running on Windows 7 locks up when trying to access a .PST on a network share

You may also notice that windows explorer also locks up when trying to work with the same .pst files, even when not using Outlook.

We’ve been seeing this a lot lately. Outlook 2010 on Windows 7, mostly x86, locks up completely when trying access .pst files that have been placed into re-directed My Documents folders. We used to do this a lot for folks back when we were running XP/2003, and although it was never officially supported by Microsoft, it worked out pretty well. After all who wants to lose locally stored archive files when a PC’s hard drive dies? Not me that’s for sure, which is why it makes sense to stick them out on a network share somewhere. Because email is private you don’t want to be sticking these files out where just anyone can grab them so we ended up just placing them into re-directed My Documents folders, the permissions were already in place and it just made sense. Flash forward, and now we’re upgrading PCs(well replacing actually) to Windows 7 and all of a sudden we’ve got lots of users unable to access their archive files.

The problem appears to be in Windows 7’s offline folders functionality. There are two solutions that we’ve come up with so far:

1) Disable offline folders for the affected PCs.

2) Move the .pst files to another share, and disable caching on that share. The only problem with this is when users are disconnected from the share they’ll get error messages in outlook saying that it can’t access the archive files.

I wish I had a better solution at this point but I don’t. I’ll update again if I can figure out a better way to solve this, feel free to throw your suggestions at me if you’ve got something that works and is more flexible.