Outlook 2003 Issues with Meetings and URL's

Hi Guys. I am an assistant sys-admin at my work and I have a number of users with a few nagging Outlook2003 issues that I can't seem to find a solution for. I will explain in detail below.

Issue 1. Recurring meetings in outlook 2003. These users are on a Dell lattitude series laptops with XP on them. What happens is that users create single instance meetings, but those meetings are changed to recurring without the user ever changing it. The steps to recreate the problem are below:

1. Go to your Outlook Calendar
2. Double click on a blank time slot in the future, to open a new appointment.
3. Enter something meaningless on the Subject line.
4. Click on the Scheduling tab.
5. Enter the names of your closest friends in the All Attendees column.
6. Click on the Appointment tab.
7. Double check that the appointment is still not recurring.
8. Select File Save to save your hard work thus far.
9. Adjust the start time and duration of the meeting.
10. Select File Save.
11. Notice that the appointment is now recurring even though you *NEVER* once pressed the Recurrence button.

I have looked around for solutions and the one suggestion I ran across was to remove Dell Media Direct application. This did not solve the issue. So at this point I am at a loss. Let me know if you need anymore details.

Issue 2

My second issue is an even more annoying one. This particular user is running vista on a mac laptop. His issue is with opening URL's in outlook. Let me give you some background on this issue just in case.

He was using Safari as his browser for a long time and it was fine, outlook didn't complain. Recently he switched to IE7 and removed Safari and since that day, every time he tries to open a URL in outlook he gets an error message that says

"This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer"

I have found several possible solutions to this issue ranging from making sure that IE is the default browser to reseting all IE settings, to replacing a corrupt registry key HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Classes\htmlfile\shell\open\command
. I have done ALL of these things and still he has the same problem. I have also made sure he has all updates, reinstalled IE7 etc so again, im out of ideas.

Thanks guys and sorry for a long post but I didn't want to create seperate topics.