iCloud on Windows 7, Corporate AD, Proxy, and Outlook 2007

See lots of discussions around this and since I managed to get mine to work, wanted to post this for all. Hope it helps.

Originally Posted this as a response to another thread. This is all trying to get iCloud control panel 2x and now 3.0 to work in a corporate AD environment with a Proxy on WIndows 7 as an admin on my box.

Here is what I found and my solution, I have reproduced this now twice since the same issues were repeated when I recently upgraded the control panel to 3.0. Both times, after fighting through all of the other issues, the real trick to finish it all up was doing the synch in safe mode (with networking).

1. Proxy issues

• My proxy requires authentication and is synched with our corp Active Directory environment. If the password for your proxy is wrong, you type it incorrectly during setup, or your AD account pasword expires and you have to change it, there are two ways to get iCloud to prompt you for your proxy id and password (which in my case is my AD domain acct and password. Our proxy syncs with AD).
• Stop the BONJOUR service - BONJOUR is the service responsible for the synch and network data retrieval. Once the service is stopped delete the keychain.plist file (located in \AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Preferences/ - it is the file that contains the proxy info) When BONJOUR is restarted it should prompt you.
• If it does not, uninstall it and re install BONJOUR and iCloud - BONJOUR will install as part of it. See below. Make sure you delete all of the data under the \AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Preferences/

2. Spinning wheel -

All my endless spinnings were, I found out using a network packet sniffer side by side with procmon, were because of iCloud not having the proxy auth right and trying and failing over and over again. Instead of error-ing out though, it just kept trying, over and over and over and over.... See above.

3. Your setup couldn't be started because of an unexpected error.If your click the button to send report, you see the error in the message as "Error: 0x80004005: _Run: Could not remove msgservice"

This was after I got the proxy auth to work, it was installed and I had rebooted to complete everything. First startup, it connected to iCloud and had downloaded everything (in my case, it was just the calendar appt's and the contact photos). When it completed it switched to the last stage, said finishing just for a sec and then gave the above error. It gave me the option to retry but thats it. Tried running as admin, tried it many times - but always with this error. Using procmon, I could see everything being written to the temp dir, then the registry updated, then my outlook profile being accessed before the error. This is solved by booting to safe mode with networking and re running the sync.

In order, here is what I did to get it to work

1. Uninstall everything Apple - BONJOUR, everything, and start from scratch.
2. Delete everything under C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Preferences/
3. Re install iCloud
4. Should prompt you for your apple id then prompt you for your proxy id during setup
5. Type your proxy id and pass correctly or make sure you are doing this in a place where you do not need a proxy, like your home WIFI
6. Reboot when the install completes and.....
7. .....boot to safe mode with networking
8. Launch iCloud control panel as admin from the START menu
9. Sign in, Start Sync, finish, and rejoice in your glory!
10. Reboot back to normal Win 7 when done.

Good luck!