One of the cool parts of my after-hours consulting gig is that I get to see, fix and document lots of weird/uncommon issues. So with that said, I have created a new category for “Bugs/Issues” where I can document these things not only for my benefit but possibly for yours. Yesterday marks another weird one.
One of my consulting customers is a 30+ staff office running Exchange 2003. One of their sales guys could never seem to open forwarded attachments. Initially I made the assumption it was just the security settings in Outlook preventing it from opening; checked those and everything was fine. I then did a simple repair/detect operation thinking something was possibly corrupt in Outlook; no improvement. I tried and was successful at opening the attachments myself in Outlook….which began to make be believe there could be some sort of plugin/3rd party product on the client machine causing this behavior.
Going back about 6 months ago I discovered that Apple iTunes installs this nifty little plugin inside of Outlook that when using IMAP causes Outlook extreme delays in startup/sync.
So with that previous knowledge from the past, I went and checked the com-addins and addins section of Outlook. I noticed two entries, Google and iTunes. After removing both entries and restarting Outlook; the staff member was immediately able to open/view messages/forwards. After some process of elimination I determined the Google plugin was the offending object. After some further research it appears there is a known bug between Google/Outlook. So with that said, here is the official bug fix…
1) Launch Outlook (so far this appears to be an issue in 2003, not sure about newer/older verions)
2) Click on Tools - Options - Other - Advanced
3) Remove Google Toolbar Tick in both Ad-In Manager and Com Ad-Ins (I actually just chose to completely remove them but either way should work)
4) Restart Outlook
Also as I mentioned, the same process about applies to fix a slow load/sync in Outlook when using IMAP protocol for your mail. Instead of removing Google remove the iTunes plugin.
2 responses so far ↓
Jason // February 28, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Travis, do you have any idea what the ITunes plugin is suppose to acutally do? I didn’t realize it was there until i looked today.
David Szpunar // March 9, 2008 at 4:48 am
Jason, my guess is that it is what lets you sync Outlook contacts with your iPod if you so choose to in iTunes. That’s my guess, not confirmed. But it seems the most likely option. And I wouldn’t be surprised if installing an iTunes upgrade re-added the addin, but again this is conjecture.
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