Outlook 2003 Hangs and slows down system over VPN

[dbradley1]

Hey all, I have a remote user who uses Outlook 2003 over a VPN
connection and anywhere from 4 to 10 times a day she gets a messages
that says outlook is trying to re-establise the connection to the
exchange server. While this is going on her system comes to a
standstill and she cant get any work done. It also kills her
connection to one of the remote systems she connects to using a hyper
terminal session. I think the issue may be with her ISP, but i have
been trying to figure out what could be cuasing this issue on her side
first. Any thought or ideas would be great.

Her system is XP SP2 with outlook2003.

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

Is she using cached mode?

Also you didn't mention what version of Exchange is in use. Reason I'm
curious is to know if user is connecting via RPC/HTTPS or RPC/TCP. One
connection type over the other might prove better than the other.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Hey all, I have a remote user who uses Outlook 2003 over a VPN
connection and anywhere from 4 to 10 times a day she gets a messages
that says outlook is trying to re-establise the connection to the
exchange server. While this is going on her system comes to a
standstill and she cant get any work done. It also kills her
connection to one of the remote systems she connects to using a hyper
terminal session. I think the issue may be with her ISP, but i have
been trying to figure out what could be cuasing this issue on her side
first. Any thought or ideas would be great.

Her system is XP SP2 with outlook2003.

Sounds more like a networking issue that an Outlook-specific issue. You
might want to speak with the vendor of the VPN client/server as well.

 

[dbradley1]

Is she using cached mode?

Also you didn't mention what version of Exchange is in use. Reason I'm
curious is to know if user is connecting via RPC/HTTPS or RPC/TCP. One
connection type over the other might prove better than the other.







- Show quoted text -

She is in cached mode and we are running exchange 2003. The vpn we
are using is a Cisco client. All other things that run over the VPN
work just fine. One of the applications is a terminal window that
runs from her on the east coast, to us in chicago, then to denver
where the main system is located. She normally has no issues using
this, unless outlook freaks out, and then it just kinda kills any
sessions that she had running.

I just mad an entry into the hosts file to hard code the exchange
server address into it. Now i have to wait and see if this makes any
difference.

 

[Randy Brook]

I have a similar situation with Outlook 2003 over Cisco VPN (high
speed cable connection). I should point out that I've been using this
exact connection for over 2 years with the same Exchange server. It
was about a month or two ago that the problem started. I connect and
download messages fine. But as soon as I click on the first new
message, or even on an old one, Outlook hangs my whole machine. I
can't even open Taskmanager at that point to see what process is
hogging resources. It can hang from a minute to over five minutes.

Usually this only happens the first time I use Outlook on a given day.
I can disconnect the VPN connection and restore it, even exiting
Outlook, and the problem usually won't return that day.

To eliminate other causes, I changed the default mail editor from Word
2003 to the built-in Outlook email editor. I also considered free
ZoneAlarm and its new email screening features. I disabled MailSafe in
ZA and removed the MailBuddy add-in in Outlook. These steps speeded up
Outlook slightly for all purposes, but had no effect on the startup
problem

I hope someone has a solution. This is unbelievably aggravating.