I know that this has been asked before and I apologize in advance for opening up the topic again. None of the answers I've found have brought much clarity to the issue.
My problem is simply that, for a certain user (who of course happens to be the executive director), Outlook 2010 no longer retains address autocomplete information. It used to work but doesn't anymore. And naturally, he really likes this feature and we look really stupid for not being able to get it working for him again. He is a standard domain user on a Windows 2008R2 domain, and we are running Exchange 2010 SP1.
I understand that Outlook 2010 no longer uses .nk2 files, but rather stores the data in some hidden "thing" in the user's mailbox on the server. I've read that this "thing" is either a hidden file, a hidden folder or a hidden message. I have no idea which, nor how or even if it is possible to examine it. I've also read that data is read from this hidden mailbox "thing" on Outlook startup, into the local AppData "Stream_Autocomplete_blahblahblah.dat" file, and that as new entries are added they somehow get saved back to the hidden server "thing" as well as the new Suggested Contacts folder. Beyond that, the exact details to me are pure voodoo and I have not found documentation of how it all really works.
We've tried creating a new mail profile for him on his own machine. We've tried creating mail profiles for him on other machines. Settings in Outlook have been double and triple checked. In every case, autocomplete data is retained for the duration of a single Outlook session but the size of the local "Stream_Autocomplete_blahblahblah.dat" file remains zero bytes. After Outlook restarts, the accumulated autocomplete data is lost. Other users with Outlook 2010 don't have the issue.
Anyone have any ideas, or at least sharing the pain? I really don't want to rebuild his mailbox from scratch just for this, but that is kind of looking like the next step. Thanks alot.