I seem to always run into obscure problems. I must be a magent for them.

The other day, my wife put a bunch of notes in an Outlook/Exchange appointment, including the address of where I needed to go to meet her. I was quite shocked when I got in my car, fired up the GPS, looked at the appointment details in my Exchange-synched WM6 phone and no notes were to be found! I had to quickly call my wife to get the address so I wouldn't be late. Thankfully, she had it on-hand.

So what would cause this? The appointment synched, but the notes were missing.

I did a little googling and found out the reason. It turns out there's a registry setting which limits the size of attached notes so you don't over-run the poor Windows Mobile device's internal storage with a bunch of crap you don't necessarily need on the go. The registry key is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ActiveSync\BodyTruncation. My BodyTruncation value was set to zero! From what I read, the default value should be 5000, which means it will sync up to 5000 bytes of notes. I have no idea how or when it got set to zero (maybe it was always that way), but that certainly explains why I had NO notes attached at all! :-)

I followed the advise at the above link and set the value to 20480 (hex 5000). I think 20K should be sufficient for appointment notes. But you can set it to whatever value you want!

I like the "classic control panel" view. All the applets are sorted in alphabetical order and I can find what I need really quickly.

I was having some issues in Outlook, so I was looking for the Mail icon, where you can easily create and delete Outlook profiles. However, the Mail icon was nowhere to be found!

I googled the google and found lots of people with the same problem and finally found a resolution. It has to do with my running Vista x64. The Mail icon is a 32-bit applet, so it won't show up next to the 64-bit applets. I needed to look for the "Additional Options" icon and then select "View 32-bit Control Panel Items" to find the Mail icon. One problem: I had a GPO enabled to force the "classic control panel" view on all machines in the domain and the classic view does not allow you to get to the "View 32-bit" section. Bummer!

Thankfully, the GPO was not implemented for security, but instead for my own Control Panel preference, so it would be safe to remove. It was (sadly) time to nuke that GPO, join the rest of the 21st century, and get used to the new multi-tier control panel. The "classic view," afterall, is modeled on the Windows 95/98 style control panel. I'm not that much of a ludite, am I? ;-)

So anyway, after a quick gpupdate /force, I boldly went to the new school "Control Panel Home" and found the "Additional Options" section that was alluding me previously. Now I found my "View 32-bit Control Panel Items" section which contained the mysteriously absent Mail icon.

Why can't classic view contain 32-bit icons? Who knows? But never-the-less, mystery solved.