Inconsistent issues with attachments - Outlook 2002

[Mark Lewandowski]

I am running Outlook 2002 (10.6515.6811) SP3 in a network situation. We also run Symantec AntiVirus Corporate 8.1.0825.

I am having an issue opening occasional attachments, particularly .pdf's. When I click on the attachment (either to save or to open) I receive "The operation failed" error. I cannot forward the e-mail either. (Same error message.) I can reply and delete though.

Once I get this error message, I find that I cannot open up some of the files I have previously been able to open. But only some. Others work fine.

Likewise, if I'm successful at opening a file, and I go back to one that was unable to open (usually from days before), it often opens up. But not always.

This has also happened with .doc files, but only after I have had a failure with a .pdf.

This is occurring now on several machines, but that may be a situation of more people are receiving .pdf's rather than a compounding problem. Virus scans (as well as searching the Internet for solutions) have found nothing.

It seems to always start from one source sending us .pdf's, but that may only be a coincidence since this person will regularly send .pdf's. (This person runs a Mac network, so a virus issue is unlikely.)

This problem is occuring with different versions of Acrobat from 5.0 to 7.0.

At first we suspected an issue with our satellite Internet connection, but we cannot seem to find a problem.

Any thoughts out there? Is this an Outlook issue, or something else?

Any help would be appreciated as this is severely impacting our business.

Mark

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[Brian Tillman]

I am running Outlook 2002 (10.6515.6811) SP3 in a network situation.
We also run Symantec AntiVirus Corporate 8.1.0825.

I am having an issue opening occasional attachments, particularly
.pdf's. When I click on the attachment (either to save or to open) I
receive "The operation failed" error. I cannot forward the e-mail
either. (Same error message.) I can reply and delete though.

The first thing to do is to disable SAV's integration with Outlook, if you
have enabled it. Do not scan incoming or outgoing mail. There is no need
and it can cause myriad problems.

The scond think to do is to clear the Outlook Secure Temp Folder. See this:
http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/securetemp.htm

 

[Mark Lewandowski]

Actually, I think we just found the problem.

We run a daily backup of our server to an external hard drive. Over the last few weeks, we've been getting errors on this backup and it hangs waiting for an operator response. I believe the hang up is occuring during the backup of the Exchange folder.

If that backup is still waiting when someone receives an attachment that is over a few hundred K, Outlook (or Exchange or ???) prevents access to that attachment.

Once the operator response occurs, the attachment is free to be accessed.

Because we had one person working on the backup issue and one on the attachment, we didn't see the correlation right away. It was basically a fluke (i.e., I suddenly got my attachments to open immediately after clearing the backup error message) and the lights went on.

Today we couldn't open attachments again and I checked if the backup failed. It had, I cleared it and all attachments worked. Pretty good proof for me.

Now to fix the backup issue which is for another forum entirely.

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