Outlook sluggish - regular bursts of file/cpu activity

[Philip Herlihy]

My customer complained that Outlook 2003 is slow to respond on his new
(much faster) laptop. Other applications respond ok, but there are
unacceptable delays typing into a mail message, or doing anything in
Outlook.

His PST file is a little over 300Mb (down from 600Mb after scolding from
me). The "performance" view in Process Explorer (sysinternals.com)
looks like this:

http://philipherlihy.members.beeb.net/Procexp-Outlook.gif

Note the very regular bursts of disk activity, accompanied by peaks in
CPU. I've attempted to examine disk activity further in Process Monitor
(sysinternals again) and it does seem to be traffic to (or maybe from)
the PST file.

I tried disabling all the add-ins I could find, including McAfee, Plaxo,
and a few others, using the Add-ins manager and Com Add-ins dialogues,
but this made no difference. I've been through all the settings and
didn't notice anything that might account for this. I'm stumped - any
ideas?

PH, London

 

[Philip Herlihy]

My customer complained that Outlook 2003 is slow to respond on his new
(much faster) laptop. Other applications respond ok, but there are
unacceptable delays typing into a mail message, or doing anything in
Outlook.

His PST file is a little over 300Mb (down from 600Mb after scolding from
me). The "performance" view in Process Explorer (sysinternals.com)
looks like this:

http://philipherlihy.members.beeb.net/Procexp-Outlook.gif

Note the very regular bursts of disk activity, accompanied by peaks in
CPU. I've attempted to examine disk activity further in Process Monitor
(sysinternals again) and it does seem to be traffic to (or maybe from)
the PST file.

I tried disabling all the add-ins I could find, including McAfee, Plaxo,
and a few others, using the Add-ins manager and Com Add-ins dialogues,
but this made no difference. I've been through all the settings and
didn't notice anything that might account for this. I'm stumped - any
ideas?

PH, London

Turned out to be a corrupt profile. Creating a new profile: see:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;829918
.... and re-entering the details of email accounts did the trick.

PH.

 

[Dave Chappell]

I also experanced this issue described by PH. Following PH's advice I created a new profile and all was well until I tried to import my contacts, the issue came with the contacts list and got back to the worst loading case when I imported my calendar. On my new profile I could delete the imported items until the loading was a it should be. On my old profile when I deleted the same items there was not change. Any thoughts as using the contacts list is a big part of Outlook. Thansk! Dave

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