Sharing Outlook Express Contacts - Becomming Corrupt

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Another one of these things which was set up before I started and haven't had chance to change it over yet to a different way (not that I've got it sorted in my head yet).

 

Currently, the PC's in the main office and offer offices arround school use Outlook Express for their email and the 2 in the main office share a Windows Address Book stored on the server with all the school contacts in there.

 

Every day for the past week, this address book has started to become corrupt and each time I'm having to restore it from the last shadow copy, which is easy to do, but is now becoming a pain.

 

Has anyone any idea what could be causing the address book to corrupt? As far as I can tell I haven't altered anything on either the server or any of the workstations that would make any difference and it worked fine for the last 6 months since I started.

 

Any help would be appreciated!

 

Thanks!

[ajbritton]

I think the key to your problem here is the word 'share'. Outlook Express was not designed to share anything between multiple running instances of the application. It expects to have sole access to the files and will not share them with another instance of the application running on another PC.

 

I've no idea how it managed to work at all unless the PCs always started in a particular order and the users of the PC that started up last never opened OE.

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In all honesty it has seemed to work since I started (and presumably for a long time before that) without a problem, it only seems to have been in the last week that problems have started to occur.

 

The two office machines both have Outlook Express open at the same time, now that you've mentioned it I'm wondering if possibly they are accessing the address book at the same time more often recently, but surely that would have occurred before now, but who knows.

 

The way it's set up, from what I can work is just that the registry is modified to point the address book to the one stored on the network rather then on an individual machine.

 

Thanks anyway.