Tonight, thanks to Mike Christl, Microsoft Partner Managed Newsgroups, I (we!) resolved my 2 week problem with the CRM Outlook Client!!! I had narrowed down the problem to involving the Outlook <> CRM synchronization process (not the going Offline synchronization process). Frankly, once I had narrowed it down, and had disabled automatic synchornization, I was able to function pretty well. But tonight, Mike gave me the path to the answer.
Mike had analyzed a trace I'd sent him and found a bad character, or characters, in a data record. Seems a record that I had recently entered had '
' between characters in a field. The Contact record (a Microsoft employee, naturally) was entered via CardScan. The Job Title contained two parts which appeared to be run together (ie TitleDepartment). But instead they were Title૞partment. Mike gave me info on the data in that Job Title field so I did an Advanced Find on the Contact\Job Title field for the Title and Department data Mike isolated. I found the one record and cleared out the Job Title field. Apparently the character string was causing some problems.
After clearing out the Job Title field, I tried synchronizing once again. (Go to CRM on the Outlook menu, and select 'Synchronize Outlook with CRM'.) It took awhile and generated a number of errors which I attribute to having run CRM and Outlook for 2 weeks, clearing/closing Activities that couldn't be synchronized. But it DID synchronize! Now my Outlook and CRM are happy with each other once again and I can use Outlook with it's link to CRM as it should be. YEA!!!