It would always be the reverse of what I would select.

i.e. If I chose to have Last Name, First Name order in Tools, Options and
entered the field the way I usually do <first last> it would put still drop
it into the wrong fields. What's really odd is that I would keep these
settings and then try entering <last, first> in the field and it would STILL
reverse the order and drop the first name in the last name field and vice
versa. It's almost like it's now programmatically handling them in reverse as
a bug in the software. This is something I've never seen before and never had
an issue with before. I thought it might be a language thing.

Understand that I am also a Microsoft Office Master Instructor and have been
using Outlook from the very first version (almost 20 years ago) so I have a
pretty good idea of the various areas to look to troubleshoot this error.

I am just wondering if it's a known bug and if there's a fix for it.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers!
Kimberly