Sorry, should have been more specific ...good news is that I went to
"uninstall", asked Outlook to "repair", which it did and the problem went
away ...bad news is that I can't tell you the specific error code# and have
no idea why this happened. The timing was inauspicious ...happened after an
automatic update of some sort (to Vista or Office 2007) which is why I
posted, thinking this might be more widespread and not just on my machine.
My other hypothesis was interaction between Outlook and Norton (still running
the free trial that came installed) and the possibility that Norton, too,
updated itself in some unfortunate way.
The symptom was that the error was the fastest real time response I've ever
seen from a MS product: as soon as it tried to process it came back with
"can't logon ..." I tried to create a new mail account using the wizared
where you just give it your mail-id and password and it tries to fill in the
variables; in that case, it spent minutes "searching" and concluded "can't
find it encrypted, wanna try unencrypted" (or something to that effect) and
if "yes", went away for another extended period without success. If I tried
to "configure myself" and then "test account" I got the immediate,
unsuccessful response.
Inasmuch as I can no longer reproduce this (for the moment?) my guess is we
will have to wait and see if this is more widespread over time before it gets
fully resolved.
Anyway, thanks for your time and response.
