Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client gotchas

I have recently come across a few interesting issues with dynamics CRM Outlook client which I would like to share, I don't think they are also widely documented.

Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client 'Sign-In' and 'Trying to Connect'
The user couldn't open CRM within Outlook despite all working perfectly, I mean, Configuration wizard completes successful, fiddler shows all connections made successful.

Another interesting behaviour was that every time I removed the configuration from the configuration wizard leaving it with no organization configured and returned to Outlook it would start configuring automatically.

Clicking on the CRM tab, was all greyed out and clicking on the CRM 2011 Button would show a page saying sign-in when you click sign-in would say trying to connect and would do nothing.

This was obviously something related with the user Outlook profile, so the resolution was to start outlook with the following swtich:

Outlook.exe /resetfolders



Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client out-of-memory errors
It seems it's no longer servers that are moving away from 32bits architecture; I have found that Outlook and even IE 32bits are struggling to keep the pace, below are a few screenshots from both IE and Outlook throwing errors after unable to allocate more memory to work with Dynamics CRM. The solution for this is to use 64bits version of Outlook and Internet Explorer.

Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client configuration wizard does not open
Upgrading the Outlook plugin from CRM 4 to CRM 2011 some times causes an odd behaviour where the configuration wizard runs on the background (only visible under processes on task manager) and then closes itself.

I found that the previous registry key from CRM 4 is not deleted from the registry and is the cause of the problem, delete the MSCRMClient folder under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient

and this should resolve the problem.

Rollup Installation Cannot load Counter Name data because an invalid index '' was read from the registry

This is related with a performance counter corrupted on the user machine. To fix the problem run the following commands on the command prompt:

C:\lodctr /r
C:\lodctr /e:CRM Client



Please leave feedback and if you have any gotchas like this please let me know, hope this helps someone.