Hi folks
at one client I have a really annoying issue with Outlook / connector, very hard to track down! The problem sometimes just arises after hours, and it may depend on what the user actually does in what particular order. Bottom line, the user gets "eventually" (more or less, he says at least three times per day) the message "The command is not allowed in this context", when he tries to read an e-mail. I have seen this message during my testing and debugging at least ONCE (as said, it may take hours before the issue arises). I have seen that message here in the forum but there it was related to a corrupt calendar entry, which I don't think is the case here. Every mail he tries to read after the message pops up first, gives the same message over and over. Just an Outlook restart fixes the issue for the next few hours. I have seen additional strange things on this client as well:
- Outlook eventually crashes after trying to send an e-mail (process needs to be killed, it just hangs for hours and does nothing, task manager shows the Outlook windows as not responding). After kill and Outlook restart the message is shown in outbox, but according to the mta logs it got send out and if I have a look at the mail in Outlook, I see it was sent. So it seems the status sent / not yet sent is set, but the move from outbox to sent did crash Outlook, or at least something different during sending did crash Outlook.
- The folder for sent mails was somewhat strange, at least eventually. The folder was NOT shown as empty, nor any error message, but you could not scroll up or down and you could not see date, subject, to, from. You just see lines as one would use tip-ex to remove all data but not the lines between mails.
- During the errors described above, new mails arriving in the inbox are not shown anymore.
I did try to record a debugging log during all these errors... but guess what? As I did record the log (it was about 1TB at the end) no errors occurred. As said, the erroneous behaviour just rises eventually, no idea how to trigger it. But I see some errors in the normal logs (see attached zip file). It is the client / profile / mailbox of the boss, so you may imagine he tends to be very annoyed when his Outlook shows errors but none of the other users, especially because he relies on Outlook most of all users.
To try to fix the issue, I did a complete reinstall of the machine (format, reinstall windows), reinstalled the connector (removed it first, deleted all scalix / outlook folders in his windows profile), reinstalled Office, tried with all current patches and service packs and without (plain Windows SP3, no office patches) to no avail. So I am almost sure something at his scalix mailbox is causing these issues. I did a "omscan -Aafvx" to check the integrity of the message store. But apart from some "missing children" no direct issues with any mailbox.
Oh, and apart from Outlook, everything else on this machine works great (graphic editing workstation, mostly Adobe products, word, excel, whatever)
So, any help / hints / thoughts appreciated!
regards
Michael