I and the intern were at a customer yesterday and ran across an issue with one of the users’ computers, when she would click the e-mail button in Adobe, giving an error:
“The connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.”
We tried various troubleshooting steps, with no success, so I decided to try creating a new local profile for her. We logged in as admin, renamed her profile folder, then logged back in under her account. The customer uses Microsoft Online Services, and when we got to the configuration of the Microsoft Online Services Sign-in application, we ran into another error (when it tried to configure Outlook):
“The operation failed due to an installation problem. Restart Outlook and try again.”
This reminded me that there had been an issue configuring her Outlook with the Microsoft Online sign-in app a few weeks back (over a CrossLoop session, I had repaired then reinstalled Outlook 2003, and finally had to find the settings to configure Outlook manually… not an easy task with Microsoft Online). I was sure that was the cause of the original Adobe/e-mail error… now I just had to find a solution. 🙂
Happily, I did. http://www.calazan.com/outlook-2003-the-operation-failed-due-to-an-installation-problem/
This article started us in the right direction. We noticed the same Warning in the Application log from MsiInstaller; we just had to recreate her profile about five more times to get it right. 😛 We tried making the registry change and then launching Outlook again from the sign-in app, but it resulted in yet another error:
“The profile name is not valid. Enter a valid profile name.”
Of course, launching a new Outlook profile only led us back to the manual creation process. Grrr.
We tried a couple more times, tried deleting the default profile in Outlook (via the Control Panel > Mail applet) and then configuring… no dice.
The solution, although it still took a few tries (intern hadn’t had enough coffee ;)), was to create a new local profile, reboot (to ensure the new profile was brand new, i.e. Microsoft sign-in settings hadn’t carried over), make the registry change from that article (we had to create the Outlook key first, then add the UserData value), then launch Microsoft sign-in. With the UserData DWORD value in place beforehand, the Microsoft Online automatic configuration went flawlessly… and with a proper Outlook configuration, the Adobe error was conquered!
On Being A Nerd... 