Taiwanese Filenames Hanging Outlook

[Guest]

We are using Exchange Server 5.5 SP4 running on Windows 2000.
Clients are either Outlook 2000 SP3 on Windows 2000 SP4 or Outlook 2003 SP1
or SP2 running on Windows XP SP2.

All clients which receive certain emails overnight from Taiwan hang and have
to be killed in the morning. Before killing the process you can see in Task
Manager that two Outlook processes are present but only the main outlook
window is visible and this doesn't refresh. My suspicion is that the other
process is some sort of invisible dialogue box that maybe prompting for font
installation or something similar.

We have narrowed the problem down to the attachment file names which include
Taiwanese characters which cannot be displayed correctly by Outlook. The
attachments themselves have Taiwanese characters which are visible in Word
(the attachments are word documents). By renaming the attachments using
normal European characters and resending the otherwise unchanged email, no
problems are encountered.

How do we solve this?

Regards

Andrew

 

[Pat Willener]

Does it also happen if you run Outlook 2003 in Unicode mode? I regularly
receive messages with Japanese file name attachments, and I do not
experience any problems (running OL in Unicode mode).

 

[Guest]

Pat

It would appear that Unicode may well be the problem. Sadly, I now discover
we are currently using Exchange 5.5 which does not support Unicode, hence
Outlook sets itself to non-Unicode mode. We are planning a migration to
Windows 2003/Exchange 2003 which will probably sort this out. In fact I'm
doing a test for that right now.

Thanks for your help.

Regards

Andrew