Using Vista-Outlook 2007, has worked fine forever. Yesterday I suddenly could not open any attachments, new ones or those attached to older emails. I could not save the attachments to my harddrive. I can forward to my phone and open them. I updated all antivirus and rescanned but found nothing. It looks like outlook thinks every attachment contains a virus, even the old ones. I use Mcaffe and I can't find anything there in the way of settings that I can mess with. Any suggestions?

What's happening when you try to open them? Are you getting an error message, in which case what is it, or do you mean Outlook is no longer giving you the option to open/save them?

the files appear in the message box but when I click on them to open, they highlight but nothing else happens and no error message. When I try to save, I get a message that the operation cant be completed

I now see that the Windows Security Center service is OFF and when I try to turn it on, I get an error that says "the security service center can't be started". I cannot access any firewall controls

Assuming your user has admin rights and isn't in a domain setup where the domain admin hasn't centrally disabled the security center, I think I'd be concerned that your machine may be infected with something.

Lots of infections prevent things like security and AV tools from running (so they can't be detected), and prevent certain activities that could be connected with trying to get rid of them, for instance going to certain websites and opening certain files. I'd focus on ensuring any infections are found and removed in the first instance (assuming there are any).

yeah this is my machine. I tried to download several files from microsoft security but each time I got an error message that the file contained a virus and was blocked. So something is making these files look bad, or is actually making them bad. Either way, my scans aren't picking anything up. Thats why I was trying to download the absolute latest protection direct from MS. Thanks for taking some time to share your thoughts.

1st, try disable the Mcafee email scanner feature, and the add-ins in Outlook, then try to open the attachments.

2nd, for the virus issue, did you scan your computer in safe mode? If no, try with it.

Also consider using the other anti-virus applications.

To obtain more helpful reply against the virus issue, I'd also recommend you to visit the forums at Microsoft Community: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/protect

Might also consider the One-on-one help from an Answer Tech: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cu_sc_virsec_master