Outlook destop alert issue

I have been having an issue with the desktop alert not working in windows 7. I have come across 1 or 2 other people with similar issues, but no solutions. I have created separate folders for my mail to be routed to based on the account. Therefore, I do not get the desktop alert for the inbox, so I added that as an option to each rule. I have also added an audio file to be played. The issue is that the desktop alert window fails to show up after outlook has been on for a while. The sound alert will play fine always. Within the email settings, the desktop alert preview button also fails to display anything. Sometimes I am able to get it to work once or twice by restarting outlook, but to do that I have to use the task manager to exit the program because just shutting down leaves OUTLOOK.EXE running. Once I first start it back up, it will close down correctly and immediately, and it will display the alerts. I have not been able to narrow it down to what causes it to stop displaying alerts, (i.e. is it a time frame that the program has been open, a certain account, etc...). It will just stop displaying them, at which point the preview button doesn't work anymore, and the closing of outlook doesn't operate correctly. I have installed all updates to outlook based on the windows update site.

I will mention that I never had this issue in XP. Also, outlook used to always leave outlook.exe running when closed in XP, but that one of microsoft's recent updates fixed that. For some reason this just appears to happen in 7. I never had vista, so I have no info on that OS.

Thanks.

TheSchaft said:

I had a similar problem and cured it by going to Control Panel > All Control Panel Items (select "small icons" to see this view) > Notification Area Icons.

You should see two icons for Microsoft Office Outlook. I set the envelope to "show icon and notifications".

Ok, tried this and all sorts of other fixes proclaimed from some other sources found... to no avail. Any other suggestions?

Thanks very much in advance.

Also - when previewing the desktop alerts, it also appears inoperative.