2008 R2, Outlook 2007: How to enable Outlook cached exchange mode?

Hi All,

Server 2008 R2 Standard, Outlook 2007

I'm a remote engineer with Server 2008 R2 installed as my local dev environment OS.  I connect to exchange, sometimes over VPN (very slow).  I want to enable cached exchange mode for Outlook 2007, but the option is greyed-out in the account Exchange Settings dialog.

I've spoken with our IT help department.  They assure me that the group policy for our ads allows cached exchange mode, and I know this to be true because I and thousands of people in our company use it.  IT had me recreate the account a few times, and then threw up their hands:  they don't support windows server OS.

Based on some other posts, I tried adding this registry setting and setting it to 0.  That did not work:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\OST\NoOst

Other posts I've read suggests that this should have something to do with Group Policy.  I don't know if it's possible for me to have a different local group policy on my machine; i.e., different than my company's ads policy.  It doesn't seem like it should be possible, but I don't know much about Group Policy.

Then, I posted this same question here:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/b2925c82-976d-44b4-bf5b-76bc27b328e6

And was directed to ask in this forum.  I also looked at these related threads:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/winserverTS/thread/db4e5d77-8a64-48be-9c3f-12f61f5c067a/

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverTS/thread/92edb935-3e55-4db7-bd09-3b9e0aeb15f7/

Both suggest the same fix (Ken.Hoopes - a registry change) which I have tried with similar results as the user in the second thread:  when I start outlook, it re-writes the value of the reg value (0036601) to 84 11 00 00.  And, in any case, the Cached Exchange Mode option is still greyed-out.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,

Hawkeye Parker