Problem 1 – Outlook won’t start

A user couldn’t start Outlook, he wasn’t clear about the error he was getting. Tried creating a new mail profile and that did fix it, but he had settings he wanted to keep in the old profile, rather than recreating it. The end fix turned out to be:

1. Click on Start Menu, go to Run.

2. Type (without quotation marks)  "OUTLOOK.EXE /RESETNAVPANE"

3.  Voila! Problem is fixed, this command resets the navigation pane back to defaults and lets Outlook start. All that is lost are customisations to views.

I have since seen this posted as a fix for “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook, Unable to open the Outlook window. The set of folders could not be opened. The server is not available. Contact your administrator if this condition persists.” at http://forums.techguy.org/business-applications/544134-cannot-start-microsoft-office-outlook.html 

Problem 2: No Address Book

I had another user who was adding names to the Address Book in a brand new clean install of Outlook 2007, but then going into a new mail and clicking the To button showed no names. Double-checked that entries did in fact have email addresses, all good there. Easy fix:

1. In Outlook, go to Tools – Account Settings.
2. Go to the Address Book tab.
3. If this is the same problem, there will be nothing listed. Click New.
4. Add an Additional Address Book, Outlook Address Book, and all should be good!

This easy fix made a 90-year old user very happy

Extensive googling got me as far as relating this problem to the display settings. Specifically. right-click on My Computer and go to the Advanced tab, then click on the Settings button under Performance. The option for Smooth-scroll list boxes has to be ticked for Live Preview to work, either explicitly as part of Custom Settings or as part of Adjust for Best Performance. So far so good – however, I found that whenever I changed these settings, they were not held, so that next time the user logged in the display settings reverted back and Live Preview was unavailable again.

Then came the hard work – was it set in Group Policy? No. Was it possible to fix it using Group Policy? No. Was it possible to nail down the registry settings involved? No. Googling pointed me to some settings, but I still couldn’t get a handle on how to force these settings every time the user logged in.

Finally, the answer – it’s not a server-side setting at all, it’s set in the RDP client! Specifically, in the connection settings for the Remote Desktop client, go to Options and the Experience tab, and make sure that Menu and Window animation is checked!

And voila! Enable Live Preview is checked in Office 2007 using Remote Desktop to a terminal server!