Can a nickname (.NK2) file lose its contents?

[mgaffney]

I have a user that says that a couple of weeks ago, when they composed Email
messages, they would type in the beginning of someone's Email address, and it
would auto-complete for them without any problem. Now, when they go to type
in an address, all of the suggested addresses that appeared before are no
longer displaying.

This user has not changed their machine, and they have not recreated their
profile either, so I wondered if it's possible that their account in Outlook
might be referencing another nickname file, or is it possible the contents of
the nickname file might have been cleaned out? Also, is it possible the an
old nickname file may be cached elsewhere?

I know this is a weird question, but it doesn't make sense to me how
suggested nicknames could be there one second, and then be gone the next.

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

Look around the group. It happens all the time.
Autocompletion has always been a troublesome and frail feature at best
because it was so poorly implemented by Microsoft. The developers at
Ingressor have discovered that while the NK2 data file is robust and rarely
if ever becomes corrupt or loses data, Outlook very often writes to the file
incorrectly
and then quickly loses the ability to write to it all together, which most
likely is
what you're seeing. The only solution so far has been to create a new
Outlook
profile, which then starts you over with an empty cache. Obviously, the
Ingressor software can correct the problem and retain your data when Outlook
craps out:
http://www.ingressor.com/helpdesk_exchange.htm