Vista / Outlook 2007 & Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTPS)

The next logical step is of course, after getting online, to get my exchange mailbox runing on my local PC (this Vista box is quite new and only turned up after I lost broadband). I thought this would've been nice and easy since I'd already messed about importing certs etc to get OWA to work properly. But I thought wrong.
After a fair bit of messing around, I needed to employ a couple of "tricks" to get operational.

If you're having problems as well, then try the following method...

First, start configuring Mail as normal (via the Control Panel icon) and put in your FQDN (local) server name and user name. Go into "More settings..." and on the connection tab, check the box for Outlook Anywhere. Click the Exchange Proxy Settings button and type in the public FQDN for your Exchange server (without the /exchange) in the "Use this URL..." box. Ensure the "Connect using SSL only" & "Only connect to proxy servers..." boxes are both ticked. In the "Only connect to..." box, type in "msstd:" (without the quotes or spaces) followed by the same FQDN as above.
Tick the "On slow networks " box.
Now, if your PC is not a domain member for any reason (mine isn't - hey I'm at home, remember), then choose Basic Authentication instead of NTLM.
Apply & OK your way out and see if the check-name lookup works (it should result in an underlined mailbox name after prompting for credentials). If so, then you should be all set... finish the wizard and fire up Outlook, put in username and password when prompted (usually more than once) and sit back and wait for your mailbox to cache. You did choose cached mode, didn't you?

If this didn't work for you, then try this:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following subkey:
1. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\RPC
3. If the RPC key does not exisit, Right-click on the Outlook key and select New Key and call it RPC.
4. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5. Type DefConnectOpts, and then press ENTER.
6. Right-click DefConnectOpts, and then click Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
8. Exit Registry Editor.
9. Close Outlook and re-open it.

Of course, if the wizard failed then start from the top after adding the registry key... and hopefully things should work as expected...