Extensive Entourage Exchange Calendar Weirdness

[kainewynd2[at]gmail.com]

I have a user who has been having consisten problem with Entourage 2004
Exchange calendar since she had it installed by my predecessor. I
don't believe that his interaction would have caused any issues as he
was one of the most competent Mac users and troubleshooters I've ever
met or corresponded with.

However, I do believe that this was an in place upgrade from Entourage
X so that may be root of the problem there. I will also admit that the
weird troubleshooting in Entourage is not my strong point.

In pre-11.2 days, her original problem revolved around all of her
calendar items suddenly needing to be dismissed... all 4200+ of them.
Along with that, she could not use the dismiss all button to
effectively dismiss all appointments - it would pretend to dismiss them
only to reappear after the next restart of Entourage. I attempted an
11.2 upgrade as one of the noted bug fixes sounded like it might
address this issue.

Post 11.2 upgrade, her calendar erased itself (over 2 years of
appointments). I was able to take a recent backup and resync *some* of
the calendar items back up with the server, in particular reoccuring
events. For some reason, individual items would not sync back up at
all and there were no outputted errors, etc, to indicate that something
was wrong.

We adapted to that and she just began from the beginning, albeit
without her large database of old appointments (which are useful for
her records). Since that time, I have upgraded her to Tiger and,
miraculously, the issues seemed to stop... until recently. This past
week Entourage has stopped accepting appointments sent by users
(specifically Outlook 2003 clients) and she has to manually input them.
As an additional "feature" when she dismisses or removes an
appointment on her work Desktop and then goes home and connects via VPN
on her laptop (using Entourage 2004 and Exchange as well) some of the
appointments she has removed are still there.

I have spent an awful lot of time trying to figure this weird problem
out and I've hit a block. I have done the usual troubleshooting, pref
file removal, Office reinstall, etc, to no avail. The rest of the
machine is running without issue so I don't believe that this is a
latent OS issue, despite the in place upgrade. Worst comes to worst,
she is receiving a new machine in the summer and I can do a fresh
install and manual setup of profiles instead of using the migration
assistant to avoid possible bad file migration, but I'd like to solve
the problem before then.

Any help that can be provided, I would greatly appreciate.
Mike

 

[Tim Lapin]

In pre-11.2 days, her original problem revolved around all of her
calendar items suddenly needing to be dismissed... all 4200+ of them.
Along with that, she could not use the dismiss all button to
effectively dismiss all appointments - it would pretend to dismiss them
only to reappear after the next restart of Entourage. I attempted an
11.2 upgrade as one of the noted bug fixes sounded like it might
address this issue.

Post 11.2 upgrade, her calendar erased itself (over 2 years of
appointments). I was able to take a recent backup and resync *some* of
the calendar items back up with the server, in particular reoccuring
events. For some reason, individual items would not sync back up at
all and there were no outputted errors, etc, to indicate that something
was wrong.

We adapted to that and she just began from the beginning, albeit
without her large database of old appointments (which are useful for
her records). Since that time, I have upgraded her to Tiger and,
miraculously, the issues seemed to stop... until recently. This past
week Entourage has stopped accepting appointments sent by users
(specifically Outlook 2003 clients) and she has to manually input them.
As an additional "feature" when she dismisses or removes an
appointment on her work Desktop and then goes home and connects via VPN
on her laptop (using Entourage 2004 and Exchange as well) some of the
appointments she has removed are still there.

Any help that can be provided, I would greatly appreciate.
Mike

You don't say how big her exchange account has become, so just for fun,
try archiving chunks of her account (mail, calendar) and see if that helps.

Naturally, I would make a backup of her entire account beforehand.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

I have spent an awful lot of time trying to figure this weird problem
out and I've hit a block. I have done the usual troubleshooting, pref
file removal, Office reinstall, etc, to no avail.

Have you rebuilt the database to force-resync the Exchange items (and
possibly fix other issues)??

Corentin

 

[kainewynd2[at]gmail.com]

Her actual cached Exchange account is 722mb (the Calendar is 3.5mb).
Her local folders encompass another 400mb. I will have the user go
through her folders and pick out what is needed and trash the rest.

As for the Force-resync and rebuilding of the Entourage database, that
has been done multiple times. I apologize for not including that
above.

Mike

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

As for the Force-resync and rebuilding of the Entourage database, that
has been done multiple times. I apologize for not including that
above.

I see... I had a somehow related problem a while back that was caused by
a corrupted calendar entry on the server. I found that out performing
port-sniffing and ealizing that Entourage would systematically choke on
some old event that would never even show up in ENoturage. Deleting it
did the trick in my case.
The problem is that you mentioned a >700MB account.. that might make
port-sniffing extremely tedious... :-\


Corentin

 

[kainewynd2[at]gmail.com]

As of right now I was able to cut the mailbox size down to ~300MB and I
am force syncing again. Hopefully, this may allay some of the
problems. I'll update as I find more.

Thanks a lot,
Mike

 

[kainewynd2[at]gmail.com]

It looks like that worked - apparently Entourage was just flaking out
because of the 700+ MB account she was using. Thank you all for your
assistance and advice!

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

It looks like that worked - apparently Entourage was just flaking out
because of the 700+ MB account she was using. Thank you all for your
assistance and advice!

I'm glad it worked

Corentin