James D. Stallardblog

I admit it, I'm a glutton for punishment. After last weeks Vista and Office 2007 debacle, I thought i'd try and install Office 2007 again, and gain some new super powers, in exchange for the teletubby GUI.

Word, Visio and Excel seem to be OK, but Outlook 2007 is in real trouble.

The Setup:
IBM X40 with 1.2Ghx Pentium M Processor, 40Gb drive and 1.5Gb RAM
windows XP SP2 with all patches and firewall off for this test.
Installation of Office 2007 was performed as an upgrade from Office 2003.

The Problems:

Outlook.EXE shows up to 100Mb used RAM in Task Manager.
When attempting to download email, Outlook freezes. Even a few small email totalling 50k takes 10+ minutes to download. Of the 11 email I was trying to download over a 3 hour period, 2 never successfully downloaded, both of which were under 8kb each in size.
I wait up to a minute after Outlook starts to render the first email in my inbox, regardless of whether that email is HTML, RTF or plain text.
Rendering any HTML email takes up to 45 seconds.

The problem is documented and described here, by a number of people and valiantly trying to stem the tide is a single MVP in the form of Patrick Schmid. I don't think Patrick is going to solve this one without help from the Mother Ship.

On to my attempts at a solution...
I know it's not my mail server as I run it myself and my wifes installation of Outlook 2003 ran perfectly throughout this exercise.

Sure, I have a reasonable sized PST file (110Mb), but I archive regularly and some of those archive PST files are multiple Gb in size. I have a few rules, but nothing excessive and Outlook 2003 performed fine.

I spent several hours trying to work through the problems and solutions described at LockerGnome (including reinstalls and various attempts to run in safe mode) and my only reward was a new error:

Task 'JDS POPMail - Receiving' reported error (0x800CCC0F) : 'The connection to the server was interrupted. If this problem continues, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'

This one didn't go away, despite nothing actually changing in the configuration, so now I have a totally non-functional installation.

Searches on Google reveal that dozens of others are suffering the same problem when trying to work with POP based installs, but it would appear that Microsoft hasn't registered the issue and provided a fix yet. It's odd that the late Beta versions of Outlook 2007 suffered with the same issues and these must have been reported. The MSDN download distribution is obviously heavily geared toward the corporate exchange user, so I wonder if enough reports were received for Microsoft to realise that they had a serious problem with their flagship productivity tool.

So, what was my solution?
It's hardly ideal, as I really wanted to hang on to the RSS Feeds feature, but without an operational mail client, RSS can hang. It was time to uninstall.

I ran the Office 2007 installation and removed Outlook 2007. Then I ran the Office 2003 installation and installed ONLY the Outlook 2003 product. I also removed the Windows Desktop Search as didn't seem to be giving me any extra benefit and was a severe drain on limited resources. Following a reboot and reinstallation of the various Office 2003 patches, I am happy to say that all is working normally again.

I'm posting this because although there are a thousand sites out there with posts about similar problems, none of the things they recommended worked. It's saved me hours of diagnostics and searches and is just too good to keep to myself! What's worse is that Microsofts own support pages have nothing but vague information about restarting services and checking file versions - all of which were tried and failed.

Windows Update Error: 0x8024400a
WSUS Error: Agent failed detecting with reason: 0x8024400a
Windows Defender Error: 0x8024400a

I run WSUS, Windows Defender and use Windows 2003 SP1 as the WSUS Server and XPSP2 as the Windows Update Client. I suddenly, and for no reason started having the above errors appearing wherever I tried to update the OS, or run Windows Defender.

All these errors are related to the same thing and I tried a number of solutions to fix them without joy.

Finally, I stopped the Windows Update Service on the PC having the problem (The Automatic Updates Service) and deleted C:\windows\WindowsUpdate.LOG. The file had grown to slightly less than 2Mb and while this is nowhere near excessive, I wanted to clear the file to get a better view of the errors. After deleting the log file, I restarted the service and ran "WUAUCLT /DETECTNOW" to force an immediate check for updates.

Amazingly, it worked. Simply deleting that file and restarting the service caused the Windows Update Service to start working again.

I find it rather unlikely that the size of the logfile is the problem per se, so my current theory is some sort of timeout due to the delay in opening a large logfile for appending. Email me if you know better and I'll update the post and credit the source.

Woe is right. This weekend, I did something I've never done and never thought I’d ever do. I installed Windows Vista and after losing some 8 hours trying to get it all working, I removed it and restored my original XPSP2 installation.

This is quite a momentous thing for me, as a self confessed, bleeding-edge early adopter. I have been following Longhorn and Vista for some time now, dutifully installing the CTP, Betas and Release Candidates as each one presented itself. Gradually, I have been gaining useful experience and getting to grips with the new-look utilities. However, all these trials were suffered in a virtual world - most of my 20 or so servers are VM Servers.

The thing about VM Servers is they are above all things, standard. They have the most pitifully box-standard virtual hardware possible - the idea being that they will work with almost any OS you care to mention.

The thing about modern computers is that they're complex.

So, the months of learning Vista was all in vain.

The first problem was Nero.
I use Nero primarily for the ImageDrive feature. It allows me to build up a library of CDs and DVDs and instead of having hundreds of disks floating about; I have a neatly catalogued collection of several hundred image files. I want to install some software, I just load the image file and the CD is instantly available. I haven't had to actually burn a CD for months, and as all my MSDN and Technet downloads come as ISO's (and the license keys are provided as XML files), this is doubly useful.

Nero 6 wouldn't install and couldn't be made to install. Undaunted, I upgraded to Nero 7 and one 350Mb download later I had a new version. Nero 7 installed fine, but Image Drive was nowhere to be found. I finally found the source files in various CAB files in the temporary installation folder under AppData (The Nero installation doesn't clean up after itself), and after collecting the MFC71 files I needed ran the ImageDrive installation by hand. No such luck, the install failed without explanation.

OK, so maybe I could look at that later. I started on Office 2007 next.
Apart from the "new" interfaces (Access is particularly "new"); the product seems ok, until I ran Outlook. in addition to steadfastly refusing to download any email from my mail server (running in the rack next door and on the same subnet), it ran a message in the status bar about setting calendar colour categories that refused to clear even after a reboot and an hour or idle time. Windows Mail worked fine with identical settings, so I guess it was fubar'd.

Ok, maybe I needed a little success, so I went for the dual display.
My laptop is a very nice IBM ThinkPad X40; very small, very light and a battery that really will go all day. I use the dual display because it only has a 12in screen and while great on the move, it's a little hard for long periods of deskbound software development. As a main screen I have a 24in widescreen monitor, but it only works when combining the IBM dual display drivers with the supplied monitor drivers to get the 1900x1200 required resolution - anything less being fuzzy and hard on the eyes.

It would appear that IBM/Lenovo have stopped supporting driver updates for kit older than 24 months and no drivers will be provided for Vista. Careful to note the exact model of my graphics card, I went over to Intel and downloaded their latest driver. All seemed to be ok, until Vista next rebooted and like magic; it uninstalled the Intel driver and replaced it with its own. In a word, arse.

So, No ImageDrive, No Outlook email and No non-fuzzy dual display.

The temporary loss of any one of these tools is not insurmountable, but this is the simple stuff. If I can't get my dual display working, then what hope do I have of getting my Bluetooth headset, or network scanner working?

Sorry to say that Vista had to go, along with Office 2007 and Nero 7 - until that is, I upgrade to the new laptop in 2007.

Microsoft dogfood their software to their staff during the CTP and beta phases. It makes me wonder how often Microsoft upgrade their desktop machines, just to keep up with their own release cycles.