That was certainly hard work.
- Find a solution. After browsing the Internet forums a lot, I decided on the free trial version of Jeyo Extender for Outlook (normally costs $20).
- Install the Outlook add-on and try to connect to the phone. No joy – although this may be because I didn’t accept a firewall change during setup. I tried adding a port exception for 9035 but that didn’t seem to help.
- Reinstall/reboot/hack the registry – all to no avail
- Install the Jeyo product on another machine – success! The PST file that the extender creates started to fill up with the 2,000+ text messages from the phone.
- Bang – Outlook crashes. The Jeyo add-on displays a really unhelpful diagnostics page which includes a stack trace. Error was “invalid file name”.
- Download Process Monitor (from Microsoft/SysInternals)and capture a trace during Outlook’s crash. Noticed a reference to D:\PROGRA~1\Jeyo\JME_WM\log\20110126.txt after some “Access Denied” errors on the log directory.
- Manually create log directory along with a Notepad file called 20110126.txt and the add-in stopped crashing Outlook! The Extender didn’t have access to create the log directory to report an error it had encountered and so bombed out. Pretty appalling error trapping.
- Now I have a PST file containing all the texts and can go to bed, job finally done. All those years in tech support at Microsoft didn’t go to waste!