Outlook Troubleshooting: Fixing Calendar Issue (calcheck.exe)

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In many cases Outlook errors are not always easy to identify. "Server issue" or "client issue?"

Introduction

One of our clients reported that his Outlook was crashing everytime he tried to view his calendar.

It happend on his client, in the Citrix XenApp desktop and on a different PC, too.

Troubleshooting

First of all we tried to fix the issue by moving the mailbox to a different Exchange database through the Exchange Management Shell. This usually helps to repair small issues within the mailbox database.

New-MoveRequest –Identity $ALIAS -TargetDatabase $DB1

Unfortunately this didn’t fix the problem.

Next step was to create a mailbox repair request to see if this brings me to the final solution:

New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox $ALIAS -CorruptionType FolderView

Nope, that didn’t helped, either.

The last thing we tried on the Exchange side was to start a calender repair using the Shell, again.

First we had to check, how the schedule was configured. we then changed this setting with the following command:

Set-MailboxServer $SERVER -CalendarRepairSchedule Saturday.21:00-Sunday.18:00

After that we just had to enable the repair setting on the mailbox with:

Set-Mailbox -Identity $ALIAS -CalendarRepairDisabled $false

So far so good… – NOT!! That also didn’t help.

From now on we changed my focus onto the Outlook client and the calendar items.

For the troubleshooting on the Outlook mailbox we installed the Microsoft software called ‘Calcheck’.

Download calcheck

You can download it directly from Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28786

(More Information about the Microsoft CalCheck Tool you can find here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-in/help/2678030/information-about-the-calendar-checking-tool-for-outlook-calcheck )

Save the tool into a folder on the PC and unzip it.

After installing it, open command prompt and navigate to the installation folder of the tool. Finally, run the following command:

We created a folder on my desktop named “calcheck” where we saved the tool to.

calcheck.exe -f

For example:

https://msb365.abstergo.ch/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/cmd.jpg

 

Solution

A folder named CalCheck will be created under the main mailbox in Outlook:

https://msb365.abstergo.ch/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/cmd-1.jpg

 

Now, all corrupted appointment items will be moved into this folder.

You can delete them from this folder and they should be gone from the calendar as well.

And you know what? That was the solution which finally fixed the issue!