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.