Does your domain start with “live."? Expect problems with Outlook 2010! [Updated with workaround]

Over on the Outlook Live forums today we discovered a very strange issue with Outlook 2010’s account setup preventing Exchange autodiscover from working for some domains. If your domain starts with “live.” then the Autodiscover and Guessmart processes don’t even kick in. You get prompted straight away to install the Hotmail Connector:

As you can see in the above example the domain doesn’t even exist. A NetMon trace shows no attempt to check the domain to somehow link it to Hotmail, and if you use the Test E-Mail Auto configuration utility it follows the “real” logic and doesn’t alert you to this problem.

Any information on exactly why this does this isn’t already out there – the closest I’ve come to an answer is over on the Outlook blog, here. If you know more – feel free to leave a comment. In the meantime I’ll be doing some more research.

Update 1 27/05/2010 – I have a solution from Microsoft for the issue. Just waiting for confirmation before I post.

Update 2 01/06/2010 - Workaround below:

NB: The following instructions are for use at your own risk. If you aren't sure what you are doing, get a professional to assist and always ensure you have an up-to-date backup that you know how to restore.

Open Registry Editor and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\AutoConfigDomains
Remove the following key:
live.*

This will of course make it so name@live.com will not autoconfigure with the Hotmail Connector.

If you want that that to still work change the Key name to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\AutoConfigDomains\live.com