Yesterday when the Microsoft made the RTM version of Office 2010 available I downloaded and installed it.  I know – shocking news.

The question however is did I have any issues?  The short answer is yes, but none that were the fault of Office.

The first issue was that I decided to move to the 64-bit version of Office instead of the x86 version.  Unfortunately what I found was that the 64-bit installer won’t upgrade or automatically uninstall the 32-bit version of Office.  It gives you a warning that you can’t install until you manually uninstall your 32-bit Office applications – no side by side installation. 

No worries, I removed my 32-bit copies of the Beta as well as my hotmail connector (I use a Windows Live address my primary professional email address.)

Following the uninstall the install went fine.  No issues with getting the new 64-bit version installed.  I then opened Word and Excel – no problems.

Then I opened or should I say ‘tried to’ open, Outlook.  I got a notice that I needed a connector to correctly open my mailbox.  That’s it, with that message Outlook said ‘goodnight’. 

So off I went with Bing to get the Hotmail Connector for Outlook, which historically was 32-bit.  Bad news again, the 32-bit Outlook hotmail connector won’t install with 64-bit Outlook.  It gives a message that it’s only compatible with Office 2003 or 2007.

I sent a note off to some friends on the MVP list and described my issue and fortunately one of them was able to point me to the 64-bit version of the Hotmail connector for Outlook.  Its a Beta, but it installed and my mail is once again available.  The location of the 64-bit connector is:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=16BAB660-54D8-4129-91C3-D86FF0D996E9&displaylang=en

Hope this helps anyone else with a similar issue.