Help with Outlook on multiple user Network

[Hotniks]

Alright, I have been having this issue on our network at work for months now and have not been able to find an answer as to why, and how to fix it. SO here goes, hopefully someone will have some ideas....

A little background; We operate a 50+ user network, file/application server is Windows 2000 Server as well as our email/Exchange server. All of our client machines (mixed laptops and desktops) are on XP Pro or Windows 2000 (most XP now though). We use the MS Office 2000 suite.

The issue: Suddenly, a couple months ago, 1 of our users began getting prompeted to enter his username, password, and domain name, upon trying to load MS Outlook. Never happened before, the user never changed a setting knowingly. Within the next few weeks after that, we found 2 other users getting the same issue. Problem is, we cannot find out what is causing them to be prompted for this information, and we cannot narrow down whether this is a server side issue, or client side. Sometimes it wont let them in, even making sure their login information is being entered corretly, I'd say its about 50/50, and after a few failed attempts, it locks them out altogether and they have to reboot and try again. Being that it happened to 3 people, in a relatively short time frame we imagine it must be server side, but we cannot be sure, and its only happening to these 3 users. We've checked and re-cehcked all of their Outlook settings and preferences, they are all identical to everyone elses settings on the network, and we've done the same thing within Active Directory, all settings the same. We're at a total loss on this one. We've uninstalled and reinstalled the program countless times to no avail.

The absolute only thing we've changed network/server wise in this time frame is that we pushed out a Group Policy to force all users to change their domain passwords every 90 days. Thats it. This problem seemed to crop up immediately following that, but we cannot pinpoint if its related somehow.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[EzyStvy]

You are repeatedly prompted for credentials when you log on to the e-mail server in Outlook 2000

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;218315

[Hotniks]

Originally Posted by EzyStvy You are repeatedly prompted for credentials when you log on to the e-mail server in Outlook 2000 http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;218315

Thank you for the reply.....I checkd out that article, in it, it tells me to do the following:

Outlook Corporate or Workgroup NOTE: The procedures in this article only apply if you have installed Outlook with the Corporate or Workgroup option. With this option, you can use Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) services. To determine your installation type, click About Microsoft Outlook on the Help menu. If you have the Corporate or Workgroup installation, you see "Corporate or Workgroup". 1. Start Outlook. 2. On the Tools menu, click Services. 3. In the Services dialog box, click your Internet E-mail account. 4. Click the Servers tab, and then click Log on using Secure Password Authentication under Incoming Mail Server.

Where I bolded, I dont have those options at all, I dont even have a servers tab there. Heh, now I'm ultra confused

[EzyStvy]

"To determine your installation type, click About Microsoft Outlook on the Help menu. If you have the Corporate or Workgroup installation, you see "Corporate or Workgroup"."

You might have installed these as standard POP3 accounts.

[mairving]

You can use this search on the MS KB to see if anything applies.

Best advice that I can give is to create another profile on the computer that is having problems. Also create a profile of the affected user on another computer. This can help narrow down the problem between machine and user. Also are you getting any error messages on the server. You might also create a dummy user (aren't they all), set that user up on a computer, manually force a password change and see if you can duplicate the error. To further test it, if you have a newer version of Outlook you might try that as well.

Just going to be a process of elimination and checking logs on the server and local machines to see if you can determine the problem. Determining the problem is always the key.

[Hotniks]

Originally Posted by EzyStvy "To determine your installation type, click About Microsoft Outlook on the Help menu. If you have the Corporate or Workgroup installation, you see "Corporate or Workgroup"." You might have installed these as standard POP3 accounts.

Yeah I did check that, I do have it installed correctly, so I'm not sure why I dont get that tab.

[Hotniks]

Originally Posted by mairving You can use this search on the MS KB to see if anything applies. Best advice that I can give is to create another profile on the computer that is having problems. Also create a profile of the affected user on another computer. This can help narrow down the problem between machine and user. Also are you getting any error messages on the server. You might also create a dummy user (aren't they all), set that user up on a computer, manually force a password change and see if you can duplicate the error. To further test it, if you have a newer version of Outlook you might try that as well. Just going to be a process of elimination and checking logs on the server and local machines to see if you can determine the problem. Determining the problem is always the key.

Good points, thanks.

What we've done so far, is take one of the problem machines (there are 3) and logged onto it as another user, setup outlook, and got in just fine, no issues. So I think we've eliminated the machines as the problem. I guess we'll just have to keep trying to eliminate things until we narrow it down further.

[Hotniks]

Actually now it appears that it may be am issue with the individual users profiles on the individual machines. Because if we log on as the problem users, to any other machines, we can get into Outlook and their email just fine.

Interesting.

[Digitalic]

A few questions.

The three users that keep getting prompted as to date, what OS are they using on the workstations? Are they all XP or W2k for example to try and find a trend?

Are the users able to log on to the Domain when they are prompted from Outlook? I saw you mentioned Active Directory so your server is running a domain and not a workgroup environment.

Do you have any restrictions such as denying log on to any local machines or domain resources in active directory.

Do you have any proprietory software pertaining to the business that could possibly cause conflicts?

Set your security logs in event viewer to audit failed log ons on the clients and especially the server which should give a clue as to whether it is client or server oriented.

You mentioned the problem started after you changed a group policy that users don`t have to change passwords after 90 days. Try changing it back to what it was. Then in active directory, edit each users profile so that the password never expires.

[Hotniks]

Originally Posted by Digitalic A few questions. The three users that keep getting prompted as to date, what OS are they using on the workstations? Are they all XP or W2k for example to try and find a trend?

All are on XP Pro, SP2

Are the users able to log on to the Domain when they are prompted from Outlook? I saw you mentioned Active Directory so your server is running a domain and not a workgroup environment.

They get on the domain just fine. Then upon attempting to open Outlook, they get prompted for the user info. When they enter the user info, it lets them in, I'd say 50% of the time, the other times it keeps failing until it boots them out of Outlook.

Do you have any restrictions such as denying log on to any local machines or domain resources in active directory.

We checked that to make sure, no we dont

Do you have any proprietory software pertaining to the business that could possibly cause conflicts?

Not that we're aware of, we've had the same software for years, never any issues before

Set your security logs in event viewer to audit failed log ons on the clients and especially the server which should give a clue as to whether it is client or server oriented.

Good idea, we'll give that a shot

You mentioned the problem started after you changed a group policy that users don`t have to change passwords after 90 days. Try changing it back to what it was. Then in active directory, edit each users profile so that the password never expires.

No, previously there was no password group policy set, the issue seemed to crop up after we implemented the group policy, which we setup to force users to change their passwords every 90 days. (with some complexity requitements as well, such as character length, etc.) Also a good idea though, we hadnt tried that yet.

Thanks

[Digitalic]

One other thing to check and I`m not sure if it would apply here but it`s worth a look to at least eliminate.

The issue doesn`t seem to follow a clear cut pattern except that the clients appeared to be XP Pro machines.

The problem doesn`t seem to be user profile oriented because they were able to log onto other machines and access their mail. I think you mentioned that other users were able to log onto the "problem" clients and access e-mail. (tough to follow and troubleshoot without being on the network and SEEING what`s going on..)

OK, you mentioned you have 50+ users on a W2k Server. You might want to check how you`re licensed. If it is per seat or per server. If you are licensed per seat then each client is licensed and there shouldn`t be a problem. If it is per server then you could possibly be running into a log on issue if all the licenses are in use. Say if you are licensed for 50 users and someone tries to log on as 51 they will be denied. You never mentioned the message that popped up when the user was denied access.

MS licensing is complex but it might be worth a look to make sure how many nodes are connected as compared to your license when the problem occurs.

[Hotniks]

Just letting those of you who helped me out that we've resolved the issue.

Wound up being a problem with the individual users profiles on their machines. We renamed their old profile, and had them log back in so it would create a new one, logged back into Outlook, problem resolved.

We're still not entirely sure what caused it, but we have a pretty good idea. We believe it has something to do with the group policy we setup, it must have forced a password change while they were currently logged onto the network, but not in Outlook, so when they tried to get into Outlook it caused a problem. We did test it on a random laptop, and duplicated our results, so aparently there is an issue between having a group policy for password change, and forcing someone to change a password while that policy is in place, or if the policy is implemented while a user is on the network, but not currently in Outlook. It must cause some type of corruption to the users profile.

[mairving]

Things like this seem to be more of an issue with Outlook 2000 and below. I haven't really had any problems with Office 2002/2003. It is also helpful if you aren't doing it already to do an Administrative Office Install rather than from the CD.

[Digitalic]

Thanks for letting us know that it is resolved and what steps you took to resolve the issue.