OWA - Cannot compose a message

[rpast]

Hello All –

Here’s a tough one: I have OWA working fine for some (internal) clients and not for others. The problem with some of the clients is that they cannot compose email. When attempting to create a new message or reply to an existing one, the control that does not load – identified in some parts of the ‘View Source’ output as ‘ctrl_message.htc’ – is the one where you type in the body of the message. What shows up instead of the big white box is a small red ‘X’ in the upper left corner of the spot where the box should appear. No problems with any of the other similar-looking forms -- New Appointment, New Task, etc. -- only in New Message.

I cannot locate what setting is responsible for disabling that control, or preventing it from loading. I’ve compared all IE settings/versions and OS/software versions on machines that can compose messages with those that cannot, and nothing is different. In fact these PCs are all the same model and have the same Group Policy build applied. I’m assuming the answer is buried somewhere in the Registry.

Before I go out and buy a tool to compare registries from two PCs, I thought I’d see if anyone has run into this problem.

Thanks for any responses.

 

[suntsu]

You might want to check for popup blockers

 

[rpast]

Thanks for the reply. It's not pop-up blockers, S/MIME-related or XP SP2-related. Those are among the false leads I followed in Microsoft KBs.

As I said, it's a tough one.

 

[xmsre]

Clear the internet exploder cache on the problem client. Try it again. Any change?

I've seen issues where network connectivity issues caused a partial download to the IE cache. On subsequent tries, the broken cached content was displayed. Clearing the cache on the client resolved the issue.

 

[rpast]

Good idea - makes sense. Didn't work though. A lot of these clients are on the lan.

I'll keep plugging away at this and let you know what I find out. Thanks for replying.

 

[rpast]

Fixed. And the answer was... a missing dhtmled.ocx file in the ..\Triedit directory. Why the file was missing on some PCs I have no idea.

Thanks to all for your efforts.