Outlook 2007 and Default Gateway problem

Published 29 September 8 6:19 PM | Vlada.Ilic

Since it is very popular to use Office 2007 nowadays, I've recently received a call from IT manager of a mid-size company (with whitch I have regular maintenance contract) to upgrade few machines from Office 2003 to Office 2007. They use Exchange 2003 Server with Outlook MAPI clients.

Great job for one of my junior squad members, I thought, and send one of them to do the job.

Not a long after, he called me saying that everything goes smooth but Outlook 2007 is reporting the error:
"The action cannot be completed. The connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable. Your network adapter does not have a default gateway."

That was, actually, true. By design, the only way the user can access Internet was through proxy settings in their browsers.

Reason:

It is documented in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913843 saying that  "This problem may occur if the Outlook 2007 client computer does not have a default gateway configured." !??

Solution (part I):

I found that KB article and told him to navigate to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\RPC" and add DWORD value DefConnectOpts vith value data of 0.
The only problem was that there was no "RPC" subkey above "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook" key !?


Solution (part II):

If there is no subkey, maybe we should try to add it manually...and guess what...it worked...;)


Conclusion:

It is not a network if you don't have Default Gateway....;))..?

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Comments

# George Simos said on May 28, 2009 6:16 PM:

Hello,

Despite that this is great info, I really don't understand why not having default gw at client machines?

If it is a security concern would you like to ellaborate a little bit on the issue please?

Thank you,

# KeHoeff said on May 28, 2009 10:07 PM:

hey this is a very interesting article!

# KrisBelucci said on June 2, 2009 7:08 PM:

I really liked this post. Can I copy it to my site? Thank you in advance.

# PeterL said on August 6, 2009 1:37 PM:

Hello,

# George Simos said on May 28, 2009 6:16 PM:

Hello,

Despite that this is great info, I really don't understand why not having default gw at client machines?

Probaly because of Proxy Server.

Fix works.

Took me some time to solve this problem since im using a ISA server to proxy i thought the fault would be in there.

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