Disable those ungodly Outlook 2010 hover-over popups!

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Outlook 2010 is pretty.  Of course aesthetics alone is rarely reason-enough to upgrade, (unless you use the Lotus Notes client).  Fortunately or unfortunately at work, my team tends to stay on the cutting edge, testing computer configurations before handing them over to our customers, including our developers.  We eat our own dog food, in a sense.

 One absolutely horrible, annoying, useless, idiotic, empty-headed-fool, middle-management-moron-inspired "feature" which should be ripped out and stuffed violently up said manager's, uh, nose, is this ridiculous uncommanded activity which occurs just by hovering your mouse over a name.

 E.g.,
  • start a new mail message
  • Populate the To: field with one or more of your contacts
  • Let your mouse and mind wander.
  • Hover over a contacts name and sweet baby jebus isn't Outlook wonderful!
  • An uncommanded action occurs
    • a new mail message appears
WTF?!1

 Try it.  Hover your mouse over a name in the To: field.  New mail message opens.  This is crap.

Uncommanded program activity is the devil.  Microsoft is going the way of IBM and Lotus Notes in turning what should be a decent messaging tool into a useless piece of kludge.  Bastards!

 Fortunately, a gentleman from Mississippi was thoughtful enough to search TechNet and do some research to find one way to address and hopefully disable the annoying, unexpected Outlook hover-over pop-up behavior.  Quote:
  1. While logged in as the user you want to disable this feature for, go to the registry.
  2. You will need to go to the following key (NOTE: you may have to create some keys in this path): HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\ContactCard
  3. In there, create a new DWORD Value of: TurnOffHoverFunctionality
  4. Set the value to: 1
  5. Restart Outlook and the pop-ups will no longer appear when you hover over a name!
Thank you, Lee!  You rock, and probably just added another year to my life. :)

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