Simultaneous Outlook 2k3 session - known issues?

[molecul3]

Hi all,

I have a user who uses two computers at his desk - simultaneously.
He opens outlook (same account) on both computers.
He reported that sometimes a mail has been received on one of the computers, but not on the other.
We even tried send/receive but the email did not appear.

He will only see the email when he clicks on another folder in outlook and clicks back into the inbox to "refresh".

Are there any known issues with opening two simultaneous sessions or is there a known bug for it?

 

[cmeagan656]

A couple of things come to mind:

1. Is it always the same computer that has issues? Is the Windows firewall enabled on that computer? If so add Outlook.exe to the firewall exceptions.

2. The only other issue that I can think of is that if the user uses Exchange and has two instances of Outlook open and (s)he changes the view on one of them and then closes that instance there could be corruption of Outlook profile. It used to be an issue with Outlook 2000 but I haven't seen it on OL2K3.

Cheers.

 

[molecul3]

Thanks for the reply cmeagan.
I will have a look at that.

 

[58sniper]

sounds like something is blocking UDP packets to the one that's not working correctly.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[molecul3]

Hi sniper,

Would the blocking of udp packets cause the email to be delayed or not arrive at all?
It just seems like it is slightly delayed or takes user intervention for the email to be displayed...
I am just wondering if it is the utilisation on both PCs.. one is not as utilised as the other in terms of system resources.. could it be as simple as that..?

 

[cmeagan656]

From personal experience the blocking of UDP definitely cause email to be delayed (actually, its not delayed, just the new mail notification is delayed). Windows firewall blocks UDP, that's why I made the suggestion to exempt outlook.exe in the firewall.

See:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815052

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839226

Cheers.

 

[molecul3]

thanks meagan,

windows firewall is disabled by gpo, so I believe that this is not the issue. Thanks for the links. It is good to know that it may have been caused by windows firewall.

 

[cmeagan656]

It definitely acts like its an issue with UDP packets.

What antivirus are you using? Does it have some sort of firewall that is blocking UDP packets?

Cheers.

 

[molecul3]

symantec.. i will take a look at this
unfortunately, i am pretty new to this environment and apparently it has not happened before and has not happened since. initial post was just to find out if there would be issues running two simultaneous sessions on two separate PCs.

 

[cmeagan656]

It may have been a one off then.

The only issue I can see is if the user has two different views of the same folder open and then closes them without changing the view back to being the same. I had a public folder corrupt for one use when she and a co-op student were using different views under her Outlook profile. Other than that, I can't see any issues.

Cheers.

 

[58sniper]

UDP is just the notifications. If you block UDP, the notifications aren't getting through. This is a known issue, and there is a KB article for this re: Windows XP.

Blocking UDP won't block email delivery. SMTP uses TCP, not UDP.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/