Outlook saving attachments WITHOUT extension

One of our users came to me complaining that occasionally when she saved attachments from email in Outlook 2007, when she went back to access the saved files later they would appear as "blank" icons and wouldn't open.

This has only ever been intermittant so tracking it down has been a right pain as the PC usually behaves itself when I look at it, but yesterday I happened to be in her office when it decided to rear it's head again so I got to see it first-hand.

The attachments display correctly in Outlook, and open directly from the email when double-clicked as you'd expect - but I noticed that when they are saved it seems Outlook is stripping the file extension from the name.

This leads to the usual "Windows cannot detect the file type, do you want to use the web service or specify an application" type message when the user tries to open an unrecognised file type or a file with no extension.

Rename the file to add the extension back in and all is peachy again. It works as you'd expect.


Comparing her workstation with mine, I noticed that in the "save as" dialogue, Outlook on my workstation correctly reflects the file type when saving, so automatically appends the extension to the name I choose to give the file.

On her workstation, Outlook just says save as type "all files" - although the drop-down is there, there are no other entries in the list so you cannot manually select the file type. So when you click save, the file is bunged out to disc with the given name but no file extension - which creates the problems when the user attempts to open it later.

Add the file extension in with the name when saving and there is no problem - file is written to disc correctly and it works.


This appears to be intermittant behaviour - restart the machine and log the user back on and Outlook will correctly save the file, automatically adding the file extension with no further intervention - but I'd rather not just give her the old IT chestnut: Turn it off and back on again, every time it happens.



So, apologies for the long-winded post, but anyone got any ideas?



Thanks in advance!




Jim