Ok, this is an issue that's been haunting me for a long time. Basically I send and receive a lot of emails (at work), and many of those have images that are embedded (ie, pasted right into the email). For awhile now, many of those images would show up as a red x. I'd get an email with 3 embedded images and two would be red Xs while the third was fine. It was perplexing.

Today I finally found the solution. First the link since this is where I found it.
http://shahine.com/omar/fixingoutlookredxproblem.aspx

The solution is to find the physical location of your Outlook secure store. It's available in the registry under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security\
in a string called OutlookSecureTempFolder

Navigate to the folder, close outlook, then delete everything in the folder. It's like a local cache so you won't actually lose anything.

That's it....issue resolved. My cache folder was up to 750 items... who know how large in file size. Outlook feels more responsive, as well.

I use it almost throughout my entire workday.

i never came across that issue.

outlook is a bitch though. Rules drive me insane especially when they decide to switch themselves off.

Yea... there are all kinds of weirdnesses. I really do use a huge number of emails with embedded images, though... my job is technical so screen shots, error messages, registry settings etc are extremely common.

Did you know there's a 10 rule limit on exchange 2003? Even though they're client-side, I can only have 10 rules active at a time. Total suckage. Maybe it was 15, but regardless, it's not enough.

Only 10? I have about 10 at the moment. That's a good shout actually.

Are you in tech support? The majority of the time i send embedded images is when im raising defects / bugs to support.

Sort of. I provide tech support to our field engineers and tech support. So I'm kinda one step up from tech support. I work with our development and QA people to fix bugs, do documentation, all that kinda jazz. I don't talk directly to customers all that much. I also don't really have any limitations on what I can and can't do on a customer's system (except when it freaks them out). A packet analyzer is one of my favorite tools.

Btw, regarding the rule limit, that's a limitation of exchange 2003. The next version of exchange is supposed to do away with that limitation. Or so my IT folks say.

Sounds like lvl 2 support at my place.

lvl 1 = Initial recipients of all issues but can only provide advice. broad but shallow knowledge of all systems. if they cant deal with it, they pass it onto lvl 2.

lvl 2 = know the relevant tool quite well and try to investigate the problem more closely. if they cant fix it it goes to lvl 3.

lvl 3 = developers.

theres often collaboration between the adjacent levels.

yea, something like that, but our level 1 guys don't really have any limitations other than laziness. And expertise, I guess.