Outlook 2013 Connectivity Problems

Hello everyone!

I have an issue that I've been trying to wrap my head around the last few weeks.

For whatever reason I have several machines running various versions of Outlook that just won't connect to my Exchange 2010 Server.

Some details on my environment:

Windows 7 running Outlook 2010 and 2013

Windows 8 running Outlook 2013

Some of the tested machines, are up to date with updates, some are not, problem seems pretty consistent to reproduce on any of them though.

It doesn't appear that anyone else on my network is experiencing this problem with 500+ users.  I can connect to the server in other ways though, Outlook Web Access works, both inside and outside of the network, my phone has no problems syncing (active sync) and configuring a outlook profile resolves the server with no errors, simply opening Outlook gets a "Cannot start Microsoft Outlook.  Cannot open the Outlook window etc...

I was able to get one of the computers to connect by deleting some mail, I had about 20,000 messages spanning 2 GB in my inbox, I dumped half of them or so into subfolders, which by itself didn't work, however deleting about 300 MB made one computer open my inbox.

The most interesting thing about this though is, that I have an old Windows 2003 Server running Outlook 2003 which always works and never has this problem.

Any suggestions??

Thanks for reading!

Mike

February 17th, 2015 4:13pm

Hi,

Are these accounts configured to work in Cached Exchange Mode or Online Mode? If they are in Online Mode, to improve the Outlook performance we generally recommend Cached Mode.

One possible cause that Outlook can't connect to Exchange is the firewall or the anti-virus program blocked the connection, please check the settings or temporarily disable the firewall to check the result.

Based on the message you got, I also found this article which might be helpful:

I cant start Microsoft Outlook 2010 or 2013 or receive the error Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook Window

Try these steps mentioned in the article:

Start Outlook in Safe mode

Run the /resetnavpane command

Repair your Outlook Data files.

Regards,

Melon Chen

Forum Support

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
February 18th, 2015 1:22am

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

After trying all of the above, it made no difference, Outlook will still only run on 1 Windows 7 computer running 2013 and on a Windows 2003 server running Outlook 2003.  As stated before, the Outlook 2003 has never had any problems connecting to the mailbox.  The other Windows 7 worked for years, stopped working and after deleting and moving messages out of my inbox it let me back in.  Are there limits that I should be aware of?  I've heard of many people having larger mailboxes and messages than I do, but I'm really at the end of my rope here.

I even deleted my entire user profile under C:\Users and edited the registry to delete all references to my username.  It created a new profile, not a temp one and on first run, Outlook still failed.

I've even enabled logging to see if I can find any errors as to look for a specific reason or event code.  The only thing that's getting logged is a generic 15003 error and Goggling that was uneventful as well.

The last resort would be to archive all of my mail, delete the mailbox, recreate it again and copy my messages back.  The last, last resort would be to delete my entire account, which would be a giant PitA.  I have to many admin roles assigned from the command line to Exchange, SQL and other things to try and recreate again.

I really think that this is an Outlook problem, since I have no issues with activesync, Outlook Web Access and earlier versions of Outlook, it just seems that something happened perhaps with update Tuesday that broke everything.  However, the one Windows 8 computer that just stopped working hasn't been updated since before Thanksgiving, so that throws a monkey wrench into that theory.

Anything else to try? 

Thanks again!

Mike

February 19th, 2015 3:32pm

Have you set any Outlook data file limitation via Group Policy? Is there something like a threshold that once the size of the data file(mailbox) is smaller than it, Outlook can connect?

Try Ctrl Click the Outlook icon in the system notification bar, test the connection status, any error?

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February 20th, 2015 10:33am

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