raabjerg

Outlook 2010 and PGP 10.x

november 30th, 2010

So I haven’t been blogging for a while. Funny I should start again with a rather technical post. However, after having spent a couple of months with low- and recently high-level Microsoft support engineers on the matter, finally to find a satisfactory solution, I feel I should share with the world.

So:

Symptoms of the problem: Outlook 2010 starts with the message “verifying data integrity” (and some small turning wheels in the lower right corner of the status bar). In this particular case, emails will potentially be lost. On a deeper level, it seems that for whatever reason, any changes made to the PST-file by Outlook within the last 10-15 seconds before you shut it down remain unsaved to the file. This will cause for instance newly received mails to be gone, deleted emails to be present, and so on. Depending on the speed you shut down Outlook with after changes are made, corruption may or may not be present. (if Outlook is shut down so fast it can’t save anything, no ‘corruption’ at the technical level will occur, it only appears it’s if Outlook is working on writing it while shutting down). The issue will only be present in Outlook 2010.

Potential solutions: The standard solutions is to deactivate all add-ins, and/or run the scanpst.exe tool to fix the PST-file. This should be tried first. Details of this can be found using google, and is rather trivial. This is not the case I am describing.

The solution I have not found anywhere else: If you have PGP 10 installed on your system, it can cause issues due to its incompatibility with Outlook 2010. Even if (as in my case) you have not enabled the messaging components, it will still cause issues. The solution is to uninstall PGP and then reinstall it without the MAPI and LSP components. This is obviously a problem if you are using the messaging feature, but if you are not and just want the basic PGP features, this is quite handy.

Details: Uninstall PGP and reboot. Locate the PGPDesktop.MSI install-file located in your temp-directory (%temp% in an explorer-window) under a folder called something like PGP[...]. If it’s not there, you need to run the proper installer and exit it when it has extracted the files (before the actual install). Run the following command in the command prompt, in the folder containing the msi-file:

msiexec /I PGPDesktop.msi PGP_INSTALL_MAPI=0 PGP_INSTALL_LSP=0

(see also documentation at pgp.com)

Let the installer finish, and it should install PGP without the MAPI or LSP components, and fix this problem if you have both Outlook 2010 and PGP 10.x installed (while I am writing this, the PGP version is 10.0.3, and as far as I can tell from the PGP support engineers, Outlook 2010 support is not coming out for a while).

It is interesting that after spending a couple of months with Microsoft engineers, I was the one to note the link with PGP (though I must admit the last Microsoft-guy was rather helpful). The case has been escalated to the Microsoft development team now, so I hope they are able to put some pressure on PGP to actually make a product that is compatible with the new version of Office. I must say I am happy with the quick response of the PGP people though.

On a more overall note, this highlights the problem with multiple companies developing software, none inclined to take responsibility for incompatibilities. Microsoft can hide behind ’3rd party software’ causing issues, though one may question whether it’s the architecture of their application that is really the problem, if 3rd party software can cause such glitches in their file-saving operations – in their own brand new OS, that is. PGP can hide behind ‘this version is not compatible with Outlook 2010′. I am sorry to admit that Mac-people do have a strong point on this. Of course, they pay a high price for a monopoly in multiple ways as well

Entry Filed under: Technology