Are there limitations on the amount of characters/letters/numbers used for a
category name?

Also, are there limitations on how many separate categories you can have in
your master category listing?

And/or are there limitations on how many categories can be listed/checked
per contact?

I am having problems with categories disappearing from some contacts which
is a major problem for us.

We have over 5000 contacts in OL and have 300 plus categories in our master
category list. It is not unusual for us to have some contacts that are
issued over 20 to 30 different categories.

Something must be maxing out somewhere on one of the above questions because
I have contacts who we check categories for and the category or some of the
categories disappear when we go into the contact again/later.

Many times when we hilight a group of contacts and right click/categories
and go in to add/delete the same categories for the whole hilighted group we
often times discover that other common categories that should be on all of
these contacts show a green filled in box (to indicate that only some of the
contacts have that category in common) instead of a check mark (which
indicates all of the hilighted contacts have that particular category).
Along this same line, we see quite often that a category for example, of
'widgets' will be listed in the category list as 'widget', however it will
also be listed such as 'widg' or a partial name of the full category name and
that block for the partial name will be checked as opposed to the 'widget'
category box.

We have been using Outlook Contacts this same way as mentioned above for 2
years now and I have not noticed this to be such an extreme problem as it is
now. I have noticed things here and there but not to this extreme.

I have researched the forum over and over again for any of the 3 situations
I am asking about above and really haven't found anything that solves this
problem

This is a public folder that 3 of us share on Windows XP Small Business
Exchange Server with Office 2003. I have run all updates on the computers
including all of the Office updates to see if this would help and I do not
see a change. I did have one computer that was not updated with SP2 so I
updated it and still no change/help.

Sorry this is so long but I am sure I forgot some of the most important
things you are going to need..........

Please help me save the few hairs I have left on my head!
Thanks in advance