Outlook 2003 Freezes on startup

[Joe]

We have about 50 computers running Outlook 2003 at our company. Some are
running SP3, some SP2, and some without any service packs. Many seem to have
a similar problem. When you open Outlook for the first time when logging in
it will just hang. No CPU or hard disk activity. You can leave it there for
an hour and it will never open. If you end the process and reopen, it opens
fine every time on the second try. My Outlook has been doing it fairly
consistantly in the past few weeks and I have no PST files and my mailbox is
fairly small. Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[K. Orland]

Here are some potential issues that may slow Outlook down:

Instant messenger. The fix is to disable the link to Instant Messenger on
Outlook's Tools, Options, Other tab.

Network connectivity issues when you are using mapped network drives,
including slow networks or inaccessible mapped drives. The fix is to uncheck
the box for the dialog to always ask whether to open/save the attachments or
disable mapped drives.

Alternative input support in Office 2003. This allows you to use speech or
handwriting instead of typing. Disable alternative input following
instructions in How to turn off the speech recognition and the handwriting
recognition features in Office 2003:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=823586

Other options are to archive, run disk checking tools like chkdsk, scandisk
and defrag. There is also the option of running detect and repair from the
help menu. If a PST is in use, run the inbox repair tool. Another step to try
is close Outlook, delete or rename the frmcache.dat, outcmd.dat, and .srs
files. Open Outlook which will then recreate them. If there is a desktop
search program installed, get rid of it.

Check COMs and Add Ins as not all are compatible with newer versions of
Outlook. Synch software can occasionally be an issue as well (for handhelds).

Also, if you're running a Dell computer that has Media Direct installed,
there is an Add In called Outlook Setup (Cyberlink). This add-in is
responsible for converting meeting requests to recurring meetings. You can
disable this.

If all else fails, delete and recreate the Outlook profile.