Introduction

Indeed, yet until now I was never able to make it work with our Exchange. Strange, it does work perfectly with direct on demand connection (common user’s home setup), but fails within Exchange. You are prompted to search for solution; however Microsoft won’t help you with that. A bug?

Test specifications

Non-Exchange environment – OS: Vista SP1, 7 Ultimate RC (tried on both), gmail account. Outlook 2007 RTM works perfectly, installing SP2 doesn’t break anything. Sweet!

Exchange environment – OS: Vista SP1, 7 RTM (tried on both), Exchange 2007 SP1. Outlook 2007 worked perfectly, however installation of SP2 broke the crucial files inside Outlook and it wouldn’t start anymore. Safe mode didn’t help either. It was the problem on Vista and remained on 7, so I decided to try self-healing. First, I launched Outlook repair from the original DVD, which, strangely enough, didn’t help. Then I installed all other critical updates that were available from Microsoft. This time a miracle happened and Outlook finally started in Safe mode with no problem. Then I closed and reopened it in normal mode and everything worked. Most important, after all these repairs, Outlook remained SP2.

Needless to say, that all previous times I just reinstalled whole Office system and started all over again. I tried taking some actions to aid the problem, but no luck at that time.

Conclusion

Don’t roll back immediately after some configuration changes/updates break everything. There is often a hope lying somewhere. Speaking about updates from Microsoft, first install all updates, then think about consequences… no, first do a backup!