It took me ages to get Outlook 2007 to connect to Exchange 2003 running on our charity’s SBS 2003 server. I eventually tracked it down to a badly behaving web scanner component of the server’s AVG installation; with this disabled everything went fine on Outlook 2007 running on my Windows 7 desktop connected up and now works flawlessly.

I confidently offered to connect up a colleage’s laptop the same way (a 10 minute job I reckoned), what a nightmare. With exactly the same settings as used on my desktop system Outlook 2007 either continually prompts for the user’s credentials or simply hangs. Outlook isn’t exactly forthcoming with it’s error reporting so when I have more time I’ll run it with the /rpcdiag switch to see if that helps pin it down but I was wondering whether anyone had any ideas. The laptop is running Windows XP Professional SP3 (as opposed to Windows 7 Professional on my desktop) but both systems run Outlook 2007 SP3 with the same RPC settings. The only other notable differance is that my desktop is wired in to our router whilst the laptop was connected to the internet wirelessly.

Has his outlook client gone into offline mode?

That’d be my guess. It’s been a while since I’ve done this though.

Never managed to make mine work. Just use outlook web access instead.

Start here to get some diagnostics:

https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/

It does seem a technology that’s fraught with difficulties, it just happens to work flawlessly on my Windows 7 system and is might nicer that Outlook Webaccess for using public folders. As far as I can tell everything’s set up the same and the server’s self-signed certificate has been installed in the laptop’s trusted authorities folder. I may have another play when I get the time though.