Outlook 2007 will not reply to certain senders

[Sterling]

I have a situation where several of my Outlook 2007 clients will not reply to
certain senders. They open the original message, click reply, type their
reply, hit send, the ribbon partially grays, and then... nothing. It just
stops. Outlook isn't hung, it just won't close the reply window and send the
message. If you close the window using the X in the upper corner you will
get a prompt to save the message. If you click save then you will get an
error that outlook could not save the message. If you click do not save then
the window will close and you can continue working. You can open a new
message and cut and paste the body of the old message into that message and
then send the reply without the issue.

Also this only happens with particular senders. You can have a message fail
to send as per the above description and then immediately select the message
below it in the list and send a reply with absolutely no issues whatsoever.

We have tried deleting the nk2 file, that didn't help. We have tried
re-typeing the reply to address, that didn't help. We use ESET NOD32 as our
antivirus. The users have two accounts, one for POP3/SMTP for send/receiving
mail and an exchange account for storing mail (exchange is not used for
sending and receiving any mail at all, just storage).

I have googled until my oogles were blue and found nothing. Any ideas?

 

[Sterling]

I have some follow up:

We have discovered that this problem is related to the user having a picture
in their signature. Also it will only occur when their signature is already
in the message (a reply to a reply situation). Removing pictures from their
signatures is a temporary fix for the problem. Also, deleting the picture
after it has been inserted into the reply will also fix the problem.

An interesting behavior is that if you encounter this error while forwarding
a message the signature image will disappear after you click the send button
and you will get an error back from outlook that the message could not be
sent. If you click the blank placeholder where the image should be and
delete it the message will then send.

At least now we know to start researching signature behavior in Outlook
2007. I will repost if we find a more compelling solution that will allow us
to keep the signature images intact.