Steve Johnson

There could be a thousand differences between my installation and anyone
else's. But in regards to your question, I was up to date on Outlook 2007
updates, and no update was installed at the time this problem occurred (it
occurred on first use of Outlook after Vista SP1 was installed).

In regards to Exchange, we use a commercial exchange provider, and I
_immediately_ began a dialog with their techs, since the symptom was that the
server could not be contacted. They found nothing.

Ordinarily, I would have left everything in place, and opened a tech support
ticket, but this was too painful, and the problem was interfering with my
work. So I document the issue here, and if a few more people see the same
symptoms, then perhaps Microsoft engineers will take note. One can hope...