Continuing the litany of problems with this month's Black Tuesday patches, Florian Winkelried, posting on the TechNet Office forum, explains his problems with Outlook 2010 search after installing the Outlook 2010 patch KB 2956128:
After installing the latest Patches for Outlook (KB2956128) we had problems with the search. We couldn't search (Advanced Search) in shared calendar. Error: Outlook cannot perform your search. Outlook cannot display this view. After uninstalling this patch the search works fine.
That's just one of the problems. In the same thread, Ben Dennis notes:
We have Outlook 2010 with Exchange 2003. The issue we experienced did not affect searches, but it did result in a login dialog being presented to the user every 2 or 3 minutes, which they had to cancel. Supplying correct credentials did not clear the dialog. We likewise had to pull this update due to the effect on the end user.
And Justin Blocksom notes:
A couple PCs in our environment that are setup to test the latest updates had OCS crash every two or three minutes after installing updates from the February patch release. Both PCs are running Office 2010 x32 with OCS 2007 R2.
Began to dig around on this and while I found no Office Communicator patches released and installed from the February patch Tuesday, I found it odd that KB 2956128 was actually listed as being installed twice on both affected machines. After I removed both instances of KB 2956128 and set the OCS Personal Information Manager back to "Microsoft Office Outlook (Contacts, ...." it has been running without any crash for 30 minutes now … OCS is now fully functional on the two PCs after removing KB 2956128 and giving it 15 to 30 minutes for search function to be restored on the PC with OCS running.
The same thread lists other symptoms: The Disable Attachment Preview option doesn't work, double-clicking attachments triggers an operation failed and a message about no permissions to write file to temporary folder, and External Laptop Clients (not domain-joined) get Password prompts in Outlook and have to cancel the prompt each time.
Blocksom wrote to me with a followup:
We had four instances of this in our test environment yesterday crashing Communicator and preventing searches/lookups within OCS. ... The solution that worked on three of the four instances was to uninstall both instances of KB 2956128 (patch appears to have self-installed twice) and after resetting the Personal Information Manager back to "MS Office Outlook," this fixes the crash issue.… This patch is bad news for us in our environment
Microsoft has asked for help in chasing down the problem. Ethan Hua writes:
We have noticed this, and would like to collect more information for further investigation.
Can you guys share your detailed system info? Also, if you have any log files about the issue, kindly share with us by sending them to this email account: ibsofc@microsoft.com (please use social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/af1df139-e8f4-4950-9f6d-147e21c40f92/ol2010search-problems-after-install-kb2956128 as the subject).
We appreciate your assistance with this.
Of course, the Knowledge Base article doesn't mention any of this.
If you're having trouble keeping your Outlook 2010 clients running, KB 2956128 may be the source of the problem.