Typing into lookup field before new form finishes loading doesn't work as expected - crm 2011 online

Question

We have a custom entity. When you create a new instance of this entity, it is defined such that the field that receives the initial focus is a lookup field of type customer.

When using outlook client, create a new email, set regarding, custom entity, new and while the new form is loading, if you start typing, various bad things happen including in some instances outlook crashing.

Looking into this, I noticed that if I use the web client and again, custom entity, new and start typing before the new form loads, while I can't crash IE, it doesn't work as expected. Sometimes it will lose some of typing and other times IE will get confused, spin it's wheels for a bit and eventually come back with some generic error message.

The problem seems to be when typing into a lookup field before the form has finished loading. The incident entity also loads with a lookup field having the focus with the same result. I've updated outlook and IE with latest patches etc.

While one obvious answer is to wait for the form to load, I have been tasked with seeing if there is any other way around this. Has anyone run into this or have any ideas? The only thing I can think of is to add a text field to the entity such that it gets the initial focus and onchange, pretend it is a customer lookup and populate the real field accordingly. This seems like an awful hack hence this email asking for ideas!

Answer 1

MS confirmed that this was a bug and it has been fixed in a subsequent CRM Outlook addin rollup. Can't remember which one...