outlook wont load at home any more?

[jim sturtz]

i have OL2002 installed at home & office and exchange.

i have a vpn tunnel between the 2 locations.

it has been working fine for over a year.

it worked yesterday monday morning at home.

tuesday morning when i tried to load OL a dialogue came up titled
'connecting to ms exchange server' and it says 'your ms exchange server is
unavailable', retry/work offline/cancel. retry does connect, work offline
doesnt, and of course cancel cancels.

if i remote access my office machine OL2002 opens fine. i can do a
directory of the exchange server drives.

needless to say i am puzzled.

the only software i have loaded recently was MSN6.1 messenger 12/19/3 and a
program called messenger plus 12/22/3. i had been running msn 4.7 for xp
messenger
and i installed msn messenger to see the difference between the two. i have
uninstalled both of those and it doesnt seem to make any difference and
reinstalled 4.7.

so anyone have any ideas what is wrong or better yet how to fix it. i
suppose i could try an OL uninstall/reinstall but thought i would see if i
could find out what is wrong first.

thanks.

jim

 

[jim sturtz]

vell.....

i talked w a friend who knows more (obviously) than i about OL and has
apparently better OL troubleshooting skills.

after checking a few other things he said, 'do you have an lmhosts file on
your computer. put an entry in it for the ip to the exchange server'

'aha!!' said i. 'actually i have diddled with my lmhost file in the last
day or so, and added some more entries to it, and of course, since i cant
leave well enough alone i changed the
name of GPTMXC001 (the exchange server) to be EXCHANGSERVER. which makes
more sense'

changing the name back fixed that.

thanks all. hope someone else gets a pointer. watch whose feet that gun in
pointed at.

jim