I had a customer with 2 problems… first, she couldn’t start her laptop, and second, she was having trouble with outlook.

When I tried restarting the laptop, it would resume from hibernation, then display a blank screen… but there was disk activity, so it seems to be busy doing *something*.

I eventually hold the power button for 5 seconds, and that forces a shutdown. I then pull the power and battery out, press the power button a few times, plugin the power and battery again, and restart the PC. This time it starts normally.

Once in outlook, I notice it doesn’t seem to have many emails. I rearrange the view to suit the customer (she like to have the email preview enabled).

outlook downloads about 20 emails. I take a look at a few, and as I view them, they seem to disappear from the inbox… that’s odd.

I figure there must be a filter thats processing the inbox, and moving the emails to other folders.

After a long time searching, looking at the inbox filtering, and sending countless test emails, I eventually notice a subtle (blue writing on slightly darker blue background) message, near the to of the main outlook window, that says something like “filtering enabled”.

That leads me to find an easily overlooked filtering option, which will hide any emails that have been viewed…

Grrr, it seems so obvious (in hindsight).