RDP and Outlook

[Mike]

Hi,

I have a couple of users who spend 1/2 of their day answering the phone at
our reception desk, and so they use RDP to connect to their office desktop to
run Outlook. They are complaining to me that if they spend a couple of
minutes on a phone call and turn back to the reception computer, that Outlook
has stopped working and they have to close outlook and open it back up to get
it to work again. This behavior has just started apparently.
Any ideas on what might be causing this? All computers are on the same
subnet/same building.

Mike

 

[Anurag Shukla]

Well Check for the PST file in the outlook & check it's wegihtage...Like its
1 GB or 2 GB or may be more.

Try disabling the unwanted Addins in the outlook

Also try running the scan pst.

 

[David B.]

Which version of Outlook? Anything in the event log?

 

[Mike]

We are running Exchange if that helps, so no .pst files. Outlook 2003 and
Exchange 2003.

Thanks for the replies.

Mike

 

[Geoff]

Are you sure it's just Outlook and not their whole RDP session back to their
desktops? Users can be annoyingly imprecise when reporting problems. Make
sure you're not chasing after the wrong problem.

Are you using any add-ons to Outlook?

Is it repeatable? Does it time out from other connections back to their
desktop? Or just from the receptionist machine? If it's truly just the
Outlook session I can't really see how it would matter from where you make
the connection, but it never hurts to confirm it. It's entirely possible
there's something wrong on the receptionist machine causing the trouble
(like a video driver issue having some strange impact). If it's really the
outlook app I'd check the receptionist video driver to start with.

Might it be possible their desktop machines are having this same problem
even when not being controlled via RDP? Check whether the power management
or screensaver settings aren't causing the problem. Also check the network
driver power management settings on their desktops. There can be all sorts
of problems if something times out because a driver has puts something to
sleep.

Make sure you're not having some seemingly unrelated networking troubles,
both on their desktops and on the Exchange server. Examine the event logs
and look for errors. There generally shouldn't be many. Make sure you're
not running out of DHCP leases.

-Bill Kearney

I would also check the timeouts on their logon screen savers to make
sure it's not a malfunction of the remote (RDP) GUI interface due to
after-market screen savers or the like.