One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about my work is that just when I think I’ve seen everything that can go wrong with a Mac, something new and crazy comes along.

Well, that was sure the case today: an Entourage Web Services Edition user could suddenly no longer connect to her Exchange server account. Entourage would just sit there, saying “Not Connected”, strangely mute. I’d never seen this before. I tried making another user on her Mac, but same problem there, so it wasn’t a corrupted preference; it had to be the app.

So I removed and reinstalled Office 2008 from the top — that’s the installer plus four updaters — and Entourage, even freshly set up, just sat there, not connecting.

I even added my own account; same symptom. I was fairly dumbfounded at this point. If it wasn’t the prefs, and it wasn’t the app, what was it? I was now somewhat stuck, but I don’t give up. I turned on logging, and there I found my clue: something about an unrecognized time zone. I went into the time zone preferences on the Mac, and while everything looked ok, I enabled the new feature in Snow Leopard which figures your time zone from your location, effectively setting it again.

I restarted Entourage, and it started syncing up like nothing ever happened.

Just another freak problem of the million or so I’ve seen…I wonder what the next will be.