OK - Let me try again.

1. I have Office Outlook 2003, SP2 with all updates installed.

2. I have several distribution lists (DLs) made up of contacts from a
Contacts subfolder

3. At (seemingly) random intervals, the following things begin to happen:

a) If I double-click on a DL member when viewing the DL, in this example,
"John Doe", I get a dialog box with the following text, "Cannot find contact
John Doe.  It may have been deleted or moved from its original location.  
Would you like to remove it from this list?" None of the contacts have been
moved or deleted.

b) Clicking on "Update Now" in the DL window results in a dialog box with
the following text, "One or more members of this distribution list cannot be
found. Would you like to: () Remove the lost members () Try to repair the
lost members and remove only those that cannot be resolved () Cancel this
operation and do not change any members.  If I try to repair the members, the
contacts are replaced with only e-mail addresses, and the contact icon
changes to a rolodex-looking icon.

c) When sending e-mails after these symptoms appear, sometimes Outlook can
resolve the addresses from the DL, sometimes it can't and says something like
that it can't find the e-mail address for a contact with the name of the DL.

4. Something I noticed just now, when opening the address book from either
the toolbar button or by clicking the "To:" button when composing an e-mail
the Contact subfolder with these contacts in it shows up in the address book,
but it appears to be empty.  Opening the contact subfolder with the contacts
in it from the folder list pane shows all the contacts. "Show this folder as
an e-mail Address Book" in the properties dialog box is checked for this
subfolder.  Unchecking it and hitting "OK" and then openign the properties
dialog box again and checking the "Show this folder as an e-mail Address
Book" and hitting "OK" allows me to see the contacts in the address book
again, but the DLs still have problems.

5. The only thing I can think of that changed the contacts was that I had
changed the view of the contact subfolder to group contacts by category.  
Switching back to the previous view does not resolve the problem.

My best guess is that the DLs use some strange static field to identify the
contact via the address book (a checksum maybe?) and when ANY change is made
to a contact, the field changes and it cannot find the contact.  Perhaps
because the contacts are in a subfolder, maybe the attempt to repair the lost
members does not search contacts subfolders, or finds the e-mails alone from
a higher priority list?

I hope that was a little more helpful.

BTW - the forum keeps saying it's busy and I lost this message a couple
times trying to post it.  So folks, save your replies to a text file before
trying to post to the forum.

Thanks,
Ken