Scenario:

We have an 'automatic orders' machine sat in the corner running XP with Outlook 2003. Its job is to check for new emails on a specific account, when it encounters one it checks the e-mail body for specific wording to determine which customer it is from (using a macro), then it checks the attachment for specific order codes before parsing the attachment to create a .csv file (which is then e-mailed onto one of the sales team) before importing the .csv into our bespoke ERP/Sales Order system to create an order.

Problem:

Periodically the machine will have symptoms of a lost network connection (unable to connect to any network source). Sometimes after several days, sometimes over a week. Volume of emails/orders processed does not seem to be linked.

Additional info:

• The machines .pst is stored on a mapped network location.
• The .csv created is stored on a mapped network location.
• This is a workgroup, not a domain.
• All network drives are Samba shares from an Ubuntu fileserver.
• Our bespoke system runs from a database (MySQL) Ubuntu server.

Our troubleshooting so far:

• I have switched machines (previous was Win2000) with the same symptoms.
• Restarting the machine FIXES the problem.
• Closing Outlook and then end tasking an Outlook.exe background process FIXES the problem.
• If you close Outlook, without end taking the background process, outlook will not reopen (saying it cannot find the pst file & it will not open any network location).
• Does Outlook have some kind of 'max session' linking it to network activity that is not closing after a mail request? Could Auto-archive be causing this?
• Is there a tool to check/display what each outlook.exe process is doing?

Have not found many ways to troubleshoot this yet, as it is so infrequent...