Outlook MAPI profiles may get programmatically deleted before the MAPI program’s session ends

When a program logs on with a MAPI profile and then deletes the MAPI profile programmatically before ending the session, you may experience issues if the following conditions are true:

• Terminal Services is also installed on the same computer.
• A user logs on remotely by using the same MAPI account.

For example, the MAPI program may not be able to access the server that is running Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server.

Typically, when a MAPI profile is deleted while the session is still active, the profile is moved to a special Deleted Profiles folder in the registry. However, the profile can still be used by the program that is in session. When the session ends, the registry entry is cleaned up.

This issue may occur if a user, or a service or a program, logs on by using Terminal Services before the MAPI program logs off. Additionally, the issue may occur when that user uses the same MAPI profile. MAPI looks in the registry, determines that a MAPI profile with the same name has been marked for deletion, and then deletes that profile. MAPI does not consider the concept of multiple virtual servers. Therefore, MAPI does not consider that a program may still be using the MAPI profile in another virtual server.

Microsoft Exchange

The issues that are discussed in the section earlier in this article can be resolved by using one of the following updates, depending on your version of Microsoft Exchange Server.

• For Exchange Server 5.5 environments, the following update is available.
  818861  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/818861/ ) MAPI cannot detect profile use between Terminal Services sessions
• For Exchange 2000 Server, the issue was addressed in the September 2003 post-Service Pack Rollup.
  824282   (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824282/ ) September 2003 Exchange 2000 Server Post-Service Pack 3 Rollup
• For Exchange Server 2003, apply Service Pack 1.
  836993   (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/836993/ ) How to obtain the latest service packs for Exchange Server 2003

Microsoft Outlook

When you are running a custom application on a Terminal Server system where Microsoft Outlook is used as an e-mail client, you may experience the issues that are described in this article.