First a quick background on this issue,
Recently someone in my company had their laptop upgraded/replaced with a newer unit, that unit being an HP 2510P running Windows XP SP2 with our standard enterprise version of MS office 2003 installed. Not long after the machine was swapped out I started to get complaints from the user stating that the Arrange by from function in Outlook was not working correctly for him. When he used Arrange by date all his emails were fine and in order, but when switched to Arrange by from the view would not sort properly. For example looking under Matt Smith, there would be emails from Joe Smith, everything seemed out of order. He also said that under the field for certain people there would be many missing emails, which he would later find filed under someone elses name.
Fist we tested and made sure that it was not an issue with his mailbox store on exchange, the event viewer was not complaining of anything related. We next created an Outlook profile for the user on my own machine and started to download some of his mail to an .ost file this way. When we did this the Arrange by from function worked fine from my machine, we also logged into webmail and made sure everything under this view looked fine there and it did, so it does not seem to be an issue with the mail store here. I also tried many different Outlook commands, such as clean views, none worked.
I figured that a corrupted offline mail file could be causing this, after all his .ost file is well over 2 GB, and although MS says that Outlook 2003 can handle .ost files larger than this size, I have seen .ost files this big cause all sorts of problems. I got the laptop for a night and was able to re-create the .ost file and let all his mail download from the server back into the file overnight. The next morning when all his mail was done downloading I played around in Outlook and made sure that the Arrange by from view was working correctly, and it was, everything was sorting perfectly and the user even said that everything seemed fine&
Then a few days later we receive notification that it is not working all the sudden after just three days. I am at a total loss on how to resolve this issue. The user is very high/important in the company and I want to get this resolved for him. Unless this user is modifying his views/filters and corrupting a setting somewhere, the only thing I can see as being the cause of this issue is simply software limitations, from my exprienence Outlook runs slow and behaves erratically when your .ost file is over 2 GB, I have seen very similar problems from other people with very large offline mail files, they get corrupted and cannot perform properly when they reach their size limit. However people with smaller .ost files that are under 1 GB generally dont have these issues or complain about Outlooks performance at all.
So besides telling this user he has to do a heavy cleanup of his mailbox (something he is not going to want to hear), is there anything else I can try here? What anyone ever ran into this issue of the Arrange by from field not sorting emails correctly? How did you resolve it? Thanks much.
