"Send" button doesn't work in Outlook

[kingsc]

Office 2007 Home and Student with Service Pack 1

Outlook 2007 (Appears to have been installed seperately from Office 2007 Home and Student)

Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1

I am completely baffled.

Everything was fine for this user until last week. Not sure if an update was applied or what, but this problem is just STRANGE.

Ok, so if he tries to send an email to a user that the computer "knows", i.e. when he starts typing the name in the To: field, it shows the recipient under where he is typing (I believe this is a MRU?), he can send as normal.

But if he tries to send to someone he doesn't "know", i.e. someone he's never sent to before, he can click the send button and nothing happens. When I say nothing happens, I mean absolutely nothing; the email doesn't even go to the outbox.

-Office Diagnostics: Nothing (Big Surprise)

-Renaming extend.dat to extend.bak and recreating (For S&Gs): Nothing

-Create new profile using exact same settings (Connect via HTTP): For some reason, this won't work either, says cannot contact exchange server, which is bogus because I've done this a million times before. I'm not sure if this is a separate/additional problem, or it's related. However he can definitely reach the Outlook Web Access server via his browser, so it's not an exchange connectivity issue. Also inside of Outlook it does connect to the Exchange server.

-Have not tried a re-install of Office yet. Trying to avoid this.

-Outlook in safe mode: Nothing

-Disabling all addins: Nothing

-Note: Did an uninstall of Norton360 which of course required me to go back and run the Norton Removal Tool because it didn't completely uninstall the firewall; it appears to be removed now.

I'm going to hit the Event Viewer and hit the send button and see if anything correlates, and double check what updates have been applied, but has anyone seen anything like this?

Edited August 4, 2009 by kingsc

[kingsc]

Looks like we have another user now with somewhat similar issues.

An interesting thing about both of these users, if you look in Even Viewer it shows several alerts saying Outlook connection to exchange could not be established, or something wierd like that, but you open the Outlook window and it says that it's connected.

I'm pretty sure both these users are configured to connect via HTTP since they are both Vista (Non-company standard) machines that haven't been configured for domain access.

[kingsc]

So I may have a clue......

There's definitely a communication problem here. When clicking the "To:" button, the "cannot contact exchange server" message pops up.

If I take the account off cached mode Outlook doesn't connect at all.

[kingsc]

Figured it out. We actually had 3 users with the problem, and 1 of them was on XP. Pinned it down to a directory service issue on the exchange server. The Sys Admin said everything looked good but restarting the server services resolved it.

Thank god!