Last week, my company updated Outlook on all PCs. After that, on my PC, Outlook couldn’t connect with the Exchange server. It’s been caused by Fiddler starting before Outlook and meddling with the LAN settings in the internet options.

I didn’t find a real solution to this connection problem.

A workaround goes like follows:

1. Make sure that Fiddler starts some seconds after Outlook. If you are autostarting both, you can reach this easily with a small batch file like this to start fiddler:

   timeout 10
   start fiddler.exe
   

2. That’s not all, though. After awakening the PC from sleep mode, Outlook is disconnected again. I’ve written a small batch file to close both Outlook and Fiddler and restart them again. Whenever I wake the PC up, I need to run this batch file.

@echo off
rem Need to use taskkill here. With pskill, fiddler wouldn't restore 
rem LAN settings and then Outlook could not connect when starting. 
taskkill /IM fiddler.exe
taskkill /IM outlook.exe
start outlook.exe
echo .
echo Soon fiddler will be started ...
timeout 7
start fiddler.exe

If anybody who reads this found a better solution, I’m quite interested!