Outlook 2003 Crashing Syncing/Receiving Hotmail

[Sid Joyner]

This is a problem that has been occurring for about 4 months now. I have
Outlook 2003 (all updates) on my desktop computer and my laptop. Since
around October, both machines have been crashing when receiving mail from my
Hotmail account. Both machine are running Windows XP Professional SP2 (all
updates).

I typically have 8 e-mail accounts that are checked every 5 minutes: 2
Hotmail accounts, 4 IMAP accounts, and two POP accounts. However, I began to
notice that Outlook was crashing when there was mail to be retrieved from a
Hotmail account. To troubleshoot and test this, I removed all e-mail
accounts, added just one Hotmail account (no POP or IMAP), did a repair on
the PST files, removed/disabled all plugins including antivirus - Outlook
would only be accessing the one Hotmail account. It performed well as long
as there was no new e-mails at the Hotmail account. So I sent a test mail to
the Hotmail account and when it next synced/retrieved the Hotmail with the
new message, it crashed midway the send/receive process. I am able to repeat
this every time so I'm sure the problem is retrieving new mail from Hotmail.

As I said, this started happening on both my Outlook installations a few
months ago. I'm wondering if Microsoft has changed the Hotmail server
protocol in any way that would be causing this. If this was the case, I
would think I would have seen a lot of posts/complaints online regarding
this issue. When I think back to what could have caused this on my side, the
only thing I can think of is that I upgraded to the final IE7 on both
computers about the same time this started happening. But I have no other
reason to think that this is related to the problem.

Bottom line: my Outlook 2003 is crashing whenever I have Hotmail to be
retrieved, not when the Hotmail Inbox is empty. Any
suggestions/advice/recommendations/information?

Thanks in advance.

 

[John Butler]

Sid

1) Can you retrieve OK from Hotmail direct?
2) Have you installed the Outlook connector for MSN, if not how have you set
up the Hotmail account?

John

 

[Sid Joyner]

Hi John:

1. Yes, I can access my Hotmail directly on the Hotmail site - no problem.

2. With Outlook 2003, you can configure Hotmail accounts directly from the
Setup/Add E-mail Account. It has been working fine for years until just the
past 4 months.

 

[John Butler]

Sid,

Yes, you can set up hotmail directly in Outlook but you do not get full
synchronisation. Following recent updates, after you have installed Hotmail
in Outlook for HTTP the latter should offer the facility of using the
Outlook connector.

So if it does not and your system is not working properly I would repair
the Outlook installation, making sure the Microsoft Office outlook connector
is installed, and reinstall the Hotmail account in Outlook

John