Outlook Crashes or Locks Up

R

rhailey

We are in the process of migrating from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003 SP2.
Actually, all user mailboxes have been migrated to the new server – all
that’s left to do is decommission the old one.

We were doing this in stages so prior to the official “cut over date†we had
migrated approximately 2/3 of our mailboxes. Some had been on the 2k3 server
for as little as a day, some for as long as a month. Nobody had reported any
sort of problems during this time – in fact, many of them didn’t even know
they had been switched. On the official day, we migrated the remaining
mailboxes, did a backup of both servers, shut the 2k3 server down, physically
moved it onto one of our racks and restarted it. It came back up – no
errors, warnings, etc. We went around and made sure we could access all the
mailboxes that had just been moved – no problem.

Exchange server is Windows 2003, SP running Exchange 2003 SP2 Advanced.
Workstations are a mix of Windows 2000 (SP3 or SP4) and Windows XP (SP1 and
SP2). Office suite is Office 2003 (no SP, SP1 and SP2).

The next day, almost all users (both those who had just been moved and those
who had been moved for some time) began experiencing Outlook problems.
Outlook would open fine and they could read, send and receive email with
seemingly no problem. However, changing from one folder to another (ex.
Inbox to Deleted Items) would cause Outlook to either freeze (with no error)
or shutdown with one of those generic “outlook has experienced a problem and
needs to be closed…send report to MS†messages. Closing/reopening Outlook
did not change anything – problem would immediately re-occur.

While this was occurring, we found that if the user used OWA to access
his/her mail then all was fine. So, seemed like we had some sort of issue
with Outlook. We tried Outlook in Safe Mode – same error. We tried starting
Outlook using different command line switches (/cleanviews, /firstrun,
/resetfoldernames, etc.) – same error. We finally found one that seemed to
work: /resetfolders. So, we went around to everyone, started Outlook with
/resetfolders and for a while everything seemed to be fine. A couple of hours
later, people were calling to report the same problems again – although not
as many as earlier in the day. It’s been a few days now and we’ve still got
a handful (probably 15-20 out of 125 or so) that still have Outlook lockup
and/or restart on them several times per day. We've also tried deleting and
recreating the Outlook profiles for the users in question - still having
problems.

The other 100 or so users haven’t had any further issues since that first day.

Anybody have any other ideas?
 

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