Icons / Forms / Cache mode issues (going mad!)

[David_Lee_2]

Hi all,

I am pulling my hair out over this one and my routes of support (MS and Symantec) have not been successful.

The environment - Exchange 2003 SP1, Outlook 2003 SP1 in cache mode, KVS 6 SP1

The issue - The icons for archived items are not appearing correctly and are showing an unopened mail icon instead.

What we have tried - Re-publishing the forms to Exchange. Checking and re-checking the top level permissions are set to reviewer. Clearing the cache. Deleting the cache. Setting the forms reload registry key in as described in http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;839804

Symptoms - When checking the forms in Outlook (forms manager) on a users machine I can see the forms but when I click on them the description field at the bottom shows no detail. If the form was installed correctly it show version information etc BTW going into on-line mode works fine and the information and icons are shown correctly but this is not an option for us.

If we install the forms manually everything is fine but I would rather publish them rather than having to visit every machine we have now and in future when updates are released unless there is another way of distributing them using something like ZenWork or SMS

This is holding up a major rollout for us now and any help you can offer is MUCH appreciated

[Marma_Duke]

Have you made sure in Tools, Send/Receive, Send/Receive Settings/ Define Send/Receive groups, Edit - that you have ticked the option to synchronise forms?

[Glenn_Martin]

Well.....carry on pulling your hair out, I've been doing so since last February, much work was done to improve the offline vault experience. The icon problem you mention is the main one that still bothers me, for the few offline vault users we've got, it's tolerable but not nice but I can see you'd be bothered greatly if you were rolling this out to all your users.....just not nice for support.

It's interesting that you can fix it by manually installing the form, I might try that myself but of course it should work properly via the forms library. However, I was reading the V6 SP1 notes the other day and they stated that this problem is still ongoing and they are now talking to MS to try and resolve it.....so I don't believe you can do more than you've already done. Your only recourse would be to push your Symantec account manager and get them to speed up the fix.

Good luck, let us all know how you get on.

Glenn

[Tremaine]

You may need to get the post SP1 roll-up or Office SP2.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=886804 / 839647

Outex.dll 11.0.6204.0 is the minimum version that is required. There are later releases of that dll that you can try.

Essentially the problem is down to a bug in Outlook cached mode where the forms are not downloaded. If it is the same issue then you could probably find that if you blow away the FRMCache.dat and restart outlook then the forms are loaded correctly the first time but a restart of Outlook causes everything to go to boot.

Let us know.

[David_Lee]

Thank you.. This forum is very helpful and I hope to help out where possible!

Marma Duke - Already tried this one! The option of turning on forms sync does not make any difference to the symptoms... even if it's not checked! It doesn't appear to have any impact at all.

Glen - The manual install is a good fix but for us to do this on 750 pc's would be painful and time consuming. Also remember that if any updates come out you will have to revisit the PC's. I am glad to hear you believe Symantec are talking to MS because all I have had from Symantec is "it not our problem talk to MS"... Very helpful!!!!!

Ghost - I have yet to try that hot fix but I am considering going to Office SP2 which I would hope contains the same thing. As for the frmcache file we have found that deleting it sometimes works but on a restart of Outlook it bombs again like you say.

This is such a frustrating problem! I would like to think that Symantec would be kicking MS to sort this out.

Thanks for the help and will post back my findings after trying Office SP2 (and still pulling my hair out I reckon!)

[David_Messeng1]

The Forms Cache is a truly woeful bit of MS technology but Symantec should be more proative in helping out with it as (doh!) they picked it as the way to distribute their code...

Are you using the forms that came with version 6 SP1 or a previous version? What is the O/S on the client? Are you using offline vault?

Someone somewhere suggested they had a way to install the forms locally using an .msi so you could dostibute it but this still sounds a messy solution.

We found our XP clients running an age old version of the forms on Outlook 2003 SP2 are stable. Out NT clients on Outlook 2000 (no SPs) corrupt about on about 50% of installs (just the 8,000 PCs then....) but tend to only do it once.

Worth trialling SP2 methinks.

Are you sure Outlook is closing gracefully (check for Outlook.exe stil running) before you clear out the cache (make sure you clear out all the EV folders and not just the frmcache.dat file. These will be locked if Outlook is still running.



David

[Paul_Costigan]

Hi, I had exactly the same and have just had a resolution from tech support. I was running an earlier client (5 sp3) which has 'undocumented problems' with Office 2003 SP1.

Firstly see which client you have on the machines with problems (if you installed KVS 6 SP1 from the offset then ignore this paragraph) Navigate to where your client files are and look at the version numbers of the files there (valkerie.dll for example) If they are version 5.03.xxxx or earlier, upgrade the client on the machine to 5.06.xxxx or later (that was what fixed my problem)

Alternatively you could try this, delete the Outlook profile (export any rules beforehand to avoid setting them up again) Create a new profile ensuring the cached mode is checked. Open Outlook and leave it for a short time so that it can inject the icons into the .ost.

Apparently, it is best practice to ensure the user is in cached exchange mode before they are kvs enabled, otherwise kvs has nowhere to store icons and it will cause problems later on (also a problem in my enterprise)

Hope this makes sense and has been of some help.