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I'm transitioning people in our office to "new" (refurb) machines running Win7 from their current WinXP machines. The only user that has gotten hers so far is having an issue where she is unable to save changes to e-mails in Public Folders through Outlook 2003 that are from external users (i.e. a client) in the state they were received (HTML; we rarely receive Plain Text e-mails from our clients, so I haven't tested her ability to save changes to those.)

To clarify, she can view the e-mail, go to edit it using Edit Message, and make changes, but hitting Save/Ctrl+S doesn't retain the changes nor does it prompt her to save changes if she closes the e-mail without hitting Save/Ctrl+S.

However, I've found that if she does the following steps she can save changes:

  1. Open e-mail and go to Edit Message
  2. Change the Format to Plain Text
  3. Save and close the e-mail
    • if she doesn't save, she will be prompted to do so at this point
  4. Re-open the e-mail and go to Edit Message again

She appears to retain her ability to edit it if she changes the Format back to HTML.

She is able to make changes using an instance of Outlook 2003 through Citrix without jumping through these hoops, and on her previous workstation she was using Office 2010 and had no problems (we don't have enough licenses to give everyone 2010 and I'm concerned this will affect the others as they receive theirs, so just getting her back to Office 2010 is not a desired solution.)

Office 2003 SP3 is installed and Windows Update finds nothing for it, nor can I find anyone else reporting this problem online.

EDIT: I should add that she was upgraded to 2010 because, when she had 2003 on her old desktop, some e-mails in public folders would consistently appear blank after we upgraded Exchange from 2003 to 2010 (part of going to SBS 2011). I don't believe this problem is related, but I thought I'd mention it. Two others had the same issue and were also upgraded to 2010. However, the remainder of our office (8 other people) had no issue continuing with 2003.

I also just confirmed that the second person to switch, who got hers about a half hour ago, is having the same issue.

EDIT 2: I forgot to mention: She can update the Subject and Importance (it will ask her to save if she doesn't do so explicitly) of these e-mails. So I don't believe this is any kind of permissions issue, rather something with the Outlook editor (I've already unchecked the Use Word for Editing settings.)

UPDATE (3/21): After restoring the factory image and installing nothing but Office, I am able to edit the e-mails just fine. I am now slowly installing updates, other applications, and making various customizations, testing after each installation (or batch of updates.) If I figure out what is interfering (which would be nice, so I can just uninstall/remove it from the other systems that were ready for deployment) I'll post the answer.

UPDATE (3/25): It continued to work fine through other setup steps, but right before I was about to deploy the image it did a huge batch of Windows updates (only after I left the domain, so I'll have to look at our SBS setup to see why it wasn't passing those updates...). 100ish in total. Once that happened, the problem returned. I am now looking through each update to find ones that might be related and will try uninstalling those one by one until it works again. For reference, of those updates the most recent was KB2930275 and least recent was KB2670838. (There was also IE11, English Spelling Package, and English Hyphenation Package.) Hopefully I can find a single update that causes the issue and post that.

Kodithic
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1 Answers1

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Uninstalling Internet Explorer 11 fixed the issue. After removing a host of other updates, I jumped the gun and uninstalled that and was able to edit these HTML emails just fine.

I found a number of other complaints about IE11 causing Outlook 2003 to send saved drafts instead of completed e-mails (if the final e-mail hadn't been saved), resulting in e-mails that look like they were truncated. In every case removing IE11 was the answer; I found some that suggested checking the Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages option under Tools->Options->E-mail Format, but I didn't see anyone that reported their issue fixed by this.

I'm going to reinstall IE11 and see if I can't fiddle with settings in either Outlook or IE11 to break this connection; I think Outlook 2003 might treat e-mails moved into public folders as some sort of draft, which would be why it was discarding any changes while AutoSave is enabled (which I believe is the default.) While it's no problem using IE10 and disabling the auto-update, at some point someone will push for getting IE11, and I don't want to deal with this problem again when that day comes

If I find a way to make it work with IE11, I'll update this post. (Though I don't know if it would fix the issue with truncated e-mails being sent.)

EDIT: I tried a few different settings in Outlook (in particular, turning off autodraft and toggling Word as editor) and checking settings in IE11 but couldn't break the connection. I need to move forward and can't spare anymore time on this, so I just uninstalled IE11 and set IE10 to not auto-update. Hopefully this is fixed in a future update to IE11 so we won't have to worry about upgrading.

Kodithic
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