So if you are in the same boat as me, you have Outlook 2007 and just installed Office 2007 Service Pack 2 for it, available through Windows Update. Computer is running on Windows Vista Home Premium.

If you use new mail desktop alerts, that little window that appears for a few seconds when a new mail arrives that tells you who is from and the subject, it might not be working following the installation of the latest update.

I unfortunately don’t have a workaround for it yet. At least not one that is worth it. I do  know that by disabling User Account Control (UAC) in Vista the new mail alerts work again. However disabling UAC is not something I’d recommend. As much as I don’t like it, UAC does make it harder for an malign intrusion to succeed. Same goes for running outlook as an administrator.

So stay tuned as events develop and hopefully Microsoft will come up with a hotfix on this very soon…

To be continued.

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So a month after my original article above, out of the blue and while checking on something else I tried a preview of the desktop alert and it worked! sent myself a test email, and it worked! I haven’t changed anything with the specific purpose of handling this. The only major changes I can think of is Vista Service Pack 2 installed, and uninstall and re-install of Trend Micro IS 2008. But I cannot tell what change made the functionality of this return to normal.
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I guess it was too soon to claim victory – 2 days later, it is once again not working…

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Update 12/14/10: Well it only took 17 months for Microsoft to fix this… I installed an update for Outlook 2007 today (KB2412171), and out of the blue the functionality of the desktop alerts was restored…