After having problems yesterday getting Crossover Mac to work, today I took a more rigid approach to installing it and it works! Here are the exact steps I took:

• Create new bottle.
• Install Crossover HTML components.
• Install IE6.
• Started IE and verified that I could view web pages (google).
• At this point I made a backup of the bottle directory from ~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles.
• Installed Office 2003, selecting only Outlook and customizing some of the installation options.
• At this point I made another backup of the bottle directory.
• Started Outlook.
• Continued through the initial configuration to connect to the Exchange server.
• Verified that I could open different types of messages, specifically both plain text and HTML.

At this point it was all pretty good now, with some minor issues:

• It takes several seconds to for a HTML email to display (on a 2x2ghz Mac Pro!).
• The message list does not refresh properly when a message is removed from the list.

I can live with those two issues, now that I have an apparently fully working install of Outlook, which is what I was after.

So, while I was initially frustrated with Crossover Mac, it does seem to be worth it, if you can spend the time getting your specific software to work correctly.

I just installed the OSX 10.4.9 update on our PowerMac G4/533 at home and had a little bit of weirdness. The first time the machine was rebooted after the install it took several minutes for it to actually start booting, leaving the screen white until it was ready - needless to say this was rather concerning, but I left it alone for a while and it finally kicked in a-ok. The Mac Pro at work had no problems, however.