Outlook locking network connection/session?
- by HaydnWVN
Scenario:
We have an 'automatic orders' machine sat in the corner running XP with Outlook 2003. Its job is to check for new emails on a specific account, when it encounters one it checks the e-mail body for specific wording to determine which customer it is from (using a macro), then it checks the attachment for specific order codes before parsing the attachment to create a .csv file (which is then e-mailed onto one of the sales team) before importing the .csv into our bespoke ERP/Sales Order system to create an order.
Problem:
Periodically the machine will have symptoms of a lost network connection (unable to connect to any network source). Sometimes after several days, sometimes over a week. Volume of emails/orders processed does not seem to be linked.
Additional info:
The machines .pst is stored on a mapped network location.
The .csv created is stored on a mapped network location.
This is a workgroup, not a domain.
All network drives are Samba shares from an Ubuntu fileserver.
Our bespoke system runs from a database (MySQL) Ubuntu server.
Our troubleshooting so far:
I have switched machines (previous was Win2000) with the same symptoms.
Restarting the machine FIXES the problem.
Closing Outlook and then end tasking an Outlook.exe background process FIXES the problem.
If you close Outlook, without end taking the background process, outlook will not reopen (saying it cannot find the pst file & it will not open any network location).
Does Outlook have some kind of 'max session' linking it to network activity that is not closing after a mail request? Could Auto-archive be causing this?
Is there a tool to check/display what each outlook.exe process is doing?
Have not found many ways to troubleshoot this yet, as it is so infrequent...
