A tip for Outlook not opening embedded files

We had a client recently call up about their Outlook 2003 not being able to open embedded files anymore. We had a couple of techs look at it and adjust settings and reinstall the software but no success. Finally the task was sent to me. So I read through the notes did some research and found 2 techniques that weren't applied yet. One had to do with a Microsoft statement about Symantec blocking it though that was not likely to be the case. The second was the presence of a SCL.CFG file which can cause the issue. I tried the second first, when there was no indication of any SCL.CFG I had to default to double checking everyone elses work and to check the settings in Symantec. All passed. I then happened to notice that Google Search Assistant was installed on the system and its plugins were on Outlook. I recalled an issue with IE not working properly due to Google and Yahoo search assistant plugins. I took this idea and went and removed all the plugins for google on Outlook. Immediately we were able to open any an all embedded files in the mail. To do this all you need to do is go into Tools, Customize, Toolbars, and uncheck google desktop toolbar.
Hope this helps.

I like google, I mean, I thinks it's really good - Picasa, search engines, scholar, translate and toolbar... but dekstop search is evil.

Oh I love google myself. I just never liked using plugins on anything to "help" me search for anything so I never knew of these issues unitl recently. It amazes me that these companies we do work for allow their users to have things like this installed.

Security policies are a joke... mostly it's because senior managers like these things and so everyone can get them. Most IT people who suggest security policies to prevent this sort thing are labelled "spoilsports"... until that is, the senior managers' precious files are corrupted and even then they don't learn. Sigh....

Other than desktop search programs, the most frequent "must haves" I see are some kind of weather monitor like Weatherbug, an "enhanced" serach bar (Ebay's is a big hit) and Southwest Airlines Ding! And what a wonderful new world widgets have opened up! Let's have a show of hands here: How many people do you see running Vista who have the clock widget displayed in all its glory. Even finer are those CPU utilization widgets that tell you your cpu utilization widget utilized 33% of your CPU.