[sand_devil]

THE PROBLEM: For the past three weeks I have been getting responses from trusted email recipients that they have been unable to open mail attachments that I have been sending.

These various documents were sent as PDF, Word or Excel files. I am running XP Pro SP2 and Microsoft Office 2003 as are most of my counterparts (so at least it has nothing to do with Vista and all its associated horrible interconnectivity gremlins...). These were files that I have created previously and with which I have never had a problem.

THE SOLUTIONS (so far): We have (i) re-installed MS Office complete, (ii) run MS Detect and Repair on every component (Word, Excel and Outlook), (iii) run SCANPST on Outlook and detected various errors, (iv) run three separate virus programs over the system and received a clean bill of health. And yet I was still receiving complaints that my email attachments were corrupt...

Then today, I was unable to open some of my own MS word files and so after some web research I decided to replace the Word Normal.dot template. Maybe this was the culprit... This went smoothly and it was cut and paste okay. MS Word opened like lightning. All looked good...

Just to be sure, I restarted my PC... and then tried to re-open Outlook.

My PC wanted to completely re-install Outlook as a new account and open a new PST file 'Outlook1'. In the new pst file all of my contacts had disappeared. After a few attempts I managed to re-direct Outlook at my original Outlook.pst file (fortunately I backed up my email yesterday and we keep a copy on our server anyway) and my Contacts re-appeared.

QUESTION: I am completely at a loss to know how 'Normal.dot' could corrupt Outlook and whether in fact this might be the problem... Does this resonate with anyone? Has anyone else had problems sending attachments in email recently?