I’ve certainly been hearing my fair share of stories about problems with Vista and Outlook 2007.  A few quick ones:

There’s something wonky about file copy in Vista.  It sits there for arbitrary periods calculating the time remaining to copy your files.  There are rumours that DRM (digital rights management) integration in the operating system is to blame.  Yikes!  I’ve heard that doing file copy at the command line or using a tool like Robocopy can alleviate the problem.

Outlook 2007 has serious problems dealing with POP and IMAP accounts.  There’s a patch to address some of the performance problems but I still have problems when doing a Send/Receive on my primary IMAP account (Outlook locks up until it finishes downloading email).

When you close Outlook, the OUTLOOK.EXE process doesn’t quit.  If you shutdown Windows with the window closed but outlook.exe still running, the process will be terminated abruptly and possibly corrupt your PST/OST files.  This problem is caused by an external app that has a hook into Outlook.  I was having this problem and narrowed it down to Skype integration.  (From the View menu in Skype, I unchecked “Show Outlook Contacts” and the problem went away.)  Obviously other Outlook add-ins can cause this same problem.  As a workaround, leave the Outlook window open when you shutdown Windows.  By leaving the window visible, a negotiation happens between the program and the operating system that gives Outlook time to close properly (or so I’ve been told – it seemed to work for me until I removed the Skype integration).

Vista and Office are great products but they definitely have some nasty blemishes.  I pulled this quote from an email:

Now I’ve resorted to using Robocopy at the command line to copy files and OWA even within my own network to regain control.  Frustrating.  My entire Dev teams are doing the same thing as well….sad actually.

Sad indeed.  Is Vista the new Windows ME?

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