RANT: Exchange Calendar and Contact email problems

I don't know exactly what or when this happened, but email has become a lot harder to use, especially around sending appointments or contacts.  Most of my customers have Exchange 2003, Microsoft has Exchange 2003 and I have Exchange 2003 here at my lab at home (where I host several SMTP domains).  Most of the time now, my customer's appointments come through as attachments to an email and not an actual appointment.  Outlook won't let me drag the appointment to my calendar or save it to the desktop, so I have no way of saving it to my calendar.  Sending these same messages to my home Exchange server results in the same issues.

I have heard that I need to have the sender change the encoding.  But why?  If they have Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2003 shouldn't it just work?  And if myself or my customers have to do this on a contact by contact basis, that will be painful!

Grrrr, to add to it, when I send a contact as an attachment it comes across as a generic email, not a contact or Vcard.

Anyone?