Outlook 2003 Slow

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About a week ago Outlook 2003 slowed to a crawl. It takes about 5 minutes to
open, several minutes to close, and about a minute per incidental click in
between. Composing new messages is next to impossible as the program freezes
for a few minutes after every few words. Outlook 2003 seems to be the only
program affected.

This is what I have done:

Disabled Messenger within Outlook.
Checked the size of my .pst files: none is over half a gig.
Checked the free space on my HD: over 30GB free.
Scanned my system with both Adaware and Norton Antivirus: system clean.
Repaired the MS Office 2003 installation from the original disc.

I still have the problem. I have no Exchange Server accounts, just 3 POP
accounts and one http (Hotmail). What else can I do to fix this problem?
 
How does it perform when you start it in safe mode?
Start-> Run; "path to outlook.exe" /safe

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-What do the Outlook Icons Mean?
-Create an Office 2003 CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 1
 
It performs the same in safe mode.

Roady said:
How does it perform when you start it in safe mode?
Start-> Run; "path to outlook.exe" /safe

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-What do the Outlook Icons Mean?
-Create an Office 2003 CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 1
--

greencw said:
About a week ago Outlook 2003 slowed to a crawl. It takes about 5 minutes
to
open, several minutes to close, and about a minute per incidental click in
between. Composing new messages is next to impossible as the program
freezes
for a few minutes after every few words. Outlook 2003 seems to be the
only
program affected.

This is what I have done:

Disabled Messenger within Outlook.
Checked the size of my .pst files: none is over half a gig.
Checked the free space on my HD: over 30GB free.
Scanned my system with both Adaware and Norton Antivirus: system clean.
Repaired the MS Office 2003 installation from the original disc.

I still have the problem. I have no Exchange Server accounts, just 3 POP
accounts and one http (Hotmail). What else can I do to fix this problem?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Do you have the POP accounts set up on a polling interval and to poll
when you connect (open Outlook)? You might try changing each account
in turn to only communicate with the account servers when you do a
send/receive and see if one of those accounts is the holdup.

I'm not familiar with using OL2003 with POP or HTTP accounts, but I do
know from experience that if Exchange becomes sluggish or
unresponsive, it affects Outlook as well. Maybe one of your providers
is experiencing trouble and your OL settings are passing the buck on
to you in that way...

O, one more thing: do you have Word enabled as your email editor? If
so, turn it off and try it, you could be blaming the wrong application
for your slowdown...

Always more words than help ;-)
JeffG


It performs the same in safe mode.

Roady said:
How does it perform when you start it in safe mode?
Start-> Run; "path to outlook.exe" /safe

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-What do the Outlook Icons Mean?
-Create an Office 2003 CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 1
--

greencw said:
About a week ago Outlook 2003 slowed to a crawl. It takes about 5 minutes
to
open, several minutes to close, and about a minute per incidental click in
between. Composing new messages is next to impossible as the program
freezes
for a few minutes after every few words. Outlook 2003 seems to be the
only
program affected.

This is what I have done:

Disabled Messenger within Outlook.
Checked the size of my .pst files: none is over half a gig.
Checked the free space on my HD: over 30GB free.
Scanned my system with both Adaware and Norton Antivirus: system clean.
Repaired the MS Office 2003 installation from the original disc.

I still have the problem. I have no Exchange Server accounts, just 3 POP
accounts and one http (Hotmail). What else can I do to fix this problem?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
As you suggested, I set all of my accounts to manual send/receive only and
disconnected from MS Word. Same results.

Could the Contacts folder slow down the entire program in this way? All of
this started at about the time I imported about 500 contacts.

JeffG said:
Do you have the POP accounts set up on a polling interval and to poll
when you connect (open Outlook)? You might try changing each account
in turn to only communicate with the account servers when you do a
send/receive and see if one of those accounts is the holdup.

I'm not familiar with using OL2003 with POP or HTTP accounts, but I do
know from experience that if Exchange becomes sluggish or
unresponsive, it affects Outlook as well. Maybe one of your providers
is experiencing trouble and your OL settings are passing the buck on
to you in that way...

O, one more thing: do you have Word enabled as your email editor? If
so, turn it off and try it, you could be blaming the wrong application
for your slowdown...

Always more words than help ;-)
JeffG


It performs the same in safe mode.

Roady said:
How does it perform when you start it in safe mode?
Start-> Run; "path to outlook.exe" /safe

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-What do the Outlook Icons Mean?
-Create an Office 2003 CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 1
--

About a week ago Outlook 2003 slowed to a crawl. It takes about 5 minutes
to
open, several minutes to close, and about a minute per incidental click in
between. Composing new messages is next to impossible as the program
freezes
for a few minutes after every few words. Outlook 2003 seems to be the
only
program affected.

This is what I have done:

Disabled Messenger within Outlook.
Checked the size of my .pst files: none is over half a gig.
Checked the free space on my HD: over 30GB free.
Scanned my system with both Adaware and Norton Antivirus: system clean.
Repaired the MS Office 2003 installation from the original disc.

I still have the problem. I have no Exchange Server accounts, just 3 POP
accounts and one http (Hotmail). What else can I do to fix this problem?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
As you suggested, I set my mail accounts for manual send/receive and
disconnected MS Word from Outlook. No change.

Could the Contacts folder slow down Outlook in this way? All of this
started at about the time I imported 500 or so new contacts.

JeffG said:
Do you have the POP accounts set up on a polling interval and to poll
when you connect (open Outlook)? You might try changing each account
in turn to only communicate with the account servers when you do a
send/receive and see if one of those accounts is the holdup.

I'm not familiar with using OL2003 with POP or HTTP accounts, but I do
know from experience that if Exchange becomes sluggish or
unresponsive, it affects Outlook as well. Maybe one of your providers
is experiencing trouble and your OL settings are passing the buck on
to you in that way...

O, one more thing: do you have Word enabled as your email editor? If
so, turn it off and try it, you could be blaming the wrong application
for your slowdown...

Always more words than help ;-)
JeffG


It performs the same in safe mode.

Roady said:
How does it perform when you start it in safe mode?
Start-> Run; "path to outlook.exe" /safe

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-What do the Outlook Icons Mean?
-Create an Office 2003 CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 1
--

About a week ago Outlook 2003 slowed to a crawl. It takes about 5 minutes
to
open, several minutes to close, and about a minute per incidental click in
between. Composing new messages is next to impossible as the program
freezes
for a few minutes after every few words. Outlook 2003 seems to be the
only
program affected.

This is what I have done:

Disabled Messenger within Outlook.
Checked the size of my .pst files: none is over half a gig.
Checked the free space on my HD: over 30GB free.
Scanned my system with both Adaware and Norton Antivirus: system clean.
Repaired the MS Office 2003 installation from the original disc.

I still have the problem. I have no Exchange Server accounts, just 3 POP
accounts and one http (Hotmail). What else can I do to fix this problem?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Hmmm... Well, at least you know it's a local issue now...

I suppose that it could slow it down - especially if some of the
Contacts are corrupted, or something went wrong with the data on
import.

Maybe you could try exporting your contacts and cleaning them
completely out temporarily, and see if that fixes it? You better read
up on doing that before you try it, I'd hate for my advice end up
costing you data along the way.

There is also a utility built-in to OL2003 for PST corruption/cleanup
that you might try - go to Help in Outlook and type in "Scan PST" or
"Inbox Repair Tool" and read up on that, it might help as well.

Make sure you back up your files first ;-)
JeffG

As you suggested, I set my mail accounts for manual send/receive and
disconnected MS Word from Outlook. No change.

Could the Contacts folder slow down Outlook in this way? All of this
started at about the time I imported 500 or so new contacts.

JeffG said:
Do you have the POP accounts set up on a polling interval and to poll
when you connect (open Outlook)? You might try changing each account
in turn to only communicate with the account servers when you do a
send/receive and see if one of those accounts is the holdup.

I'm not familiar with using OL2003 with POP or HTTP accounts, but I do
know from experience that if Exchange becomes sluggish or
unresponsive, it affects Outlook as well. Maybe one of your providers
is experiencing trouble and your OL settings are passing the buck on
to you in that way...

O, one more thing: do you have Word enabled as your email editor? If
so, turn it off and try it, you could be blaming the wrong application
for your slowdown...

Always more words than help ;-)
JeffG


It performs the same in safe mode.

:

How does it perform when you start it in safe mode?
Start-> Run; "path to outlook.exe" /safe

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-What do the Outlook Icons Mean?
-Create an Office 2003 CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 1
--

About a week ago Outlook 2003 slowed to a crawl. It takes about 5 minutes
to
open, several minutes to close, and about a minute per incidental click in
between. Composing new messages is next to impossible as the program
freezes
for a few minutes after every few words. Outlook 2003 seems to be the
only
program affected.

This is what I have done:

Disabled Messenger within Outlook.
Checked the size of my .pst files: none is over half a gig.
Checked the free space on my HD: over 30GB free.
Scanned my system with both Adaware and Norton Antivirus: system clean.
Repaired the MS Office 2003 installation from the original disc.

I still have the problem. I have no Exchange Server accounts, just 3 POP
accounts and one http (Hotmail). What else can I do to fix this problem?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Hey,

thank you for the tip.
In "Options" -> "Mail Format", I unchecked the box "Use Word 2003 to
edit messages", and now my email messages display much quicker.
As you said, we might be blaming the wrong app!

Thanks again...

PY
 
Welcome! And note that you might miss a few of Words additional
functions, but for the most part, I think Outlook Rich Text format
does a fine job all on it's own.

Of course everyone has an opinion, but not everyone expresses it. The
nice thing about a newsgroup is you don't HAVE to listen...
J
 
I found it!
It was the spoolsv.exe process running the CPU at 99%. (No, I don't know
why Outlook is the only program that I noticed to be affected.) My son and I
share a printer connected to my desktop through a home network. For some
reason one of his print jobs did not go to the intended printer, but to an
"Office Document Printer" instead. I deleted the job, the phantom printer
went away, the spoolsv.exe process went back to 0% CPU, and Outlook runs
great.
Thank you again for you efforts in solving my problem.

JeffG said:
Hmmm... Well, at least you know it's a local issue now...

I suppose that it could slow it down - especially if some of the
Contacts are corrupted, or something went wrong with the data on
import.

Maybe you could try exporting your contacts and cleaning them
completely out temporarily, and see if that fixes it? You better read
up on doing that before you try it, I'd hate for my advice end up
costing you data along the way.

There is also a utility built-in to OL2003 for PST corruption/cleanup
that you might try - go to Help in Outlook and type in "Scan PST" or
"Inbox Repair Tool" and read up on that, it might help as well.

Make sure you back up your files first ;-)
JeffG

As you suggested, I set my mail accounts for manual send/receive and
disconnected MS Word from Outlook. No change.

Could the Contacts folder slow down Outlook in this way? All of this
started at about the time I imported 500 or so new contacts.

JeffG said:
Do you have the POP accounts set up on a polling interval and to poll
when you connect (open Outlook)? You might try changing each account
in turn to only communicate with the account servers when you do a
send/receive and see if one of those accounts is the holdup.

I'm not familiar with using OL2003 with POP or HTTP accounts, but I do
know from experience that if Exchange becomes sluggish or
unresponsive, it affects Outlook as well. Maybe one of your providers
is experiencing trouble and your OL settings are passing the buck on
to you in that way...

O, one more thing: do you have Word enabled as your email editor? If
so, turn it off and try it, you could be blaming the wrong application
for your slowdown...

Always more words than help ;-)
JeffG


On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 09:47:10 -0800, "greencw"

It performs the same in safe mode.

:

How does it perform when you start it in safe mode?
Start-> Run; "path to outlook.exe" /safe

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-What do the Outlook Icons Mean?
-Create an Office 2003 CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 1
--

About a week ago Outlook 2003 slowed to a crawl. It takes about 5 minutes
to
open, several minutes to close, and about a minute per incidental click in
between. Composing new messages is next to impossible as the program
freezes
for a few minutes after every few words. Outlook 2003 seems to be the
only
program affected.

This is what I have done:

Disabled Messenger within Outlook.
Checked the size of my .pst files: none is over half a gig.
Checked the free space on my HD: over 30GB free.
Scanned my system with both Adaware and Norton Antivirus: system clean.
Repaired the MS Office 2003 installation from the original disc.

I still have the problem. I have no Exchange Server accounts, just 3 POP
accounts and one http (Hotmail). What else can I do to fix this problem?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Silly Machines ;-)
Glad to provide what help it was.
J

I found it!
It was the spoolsv.exe process running the CPU at 99%. (No, I don't know
why Outlook is the only program that I noticed to be affected.) My son and I
share a printer connected to my desktop through a home network. For some
reason one of his print jobs did not go to the intended printer, but to an
"Office Document Printer" instead. I deleted the job, the phantom printer
went away, the spoolsv.exe process went back to 0% CPU, and Outlook runs
great.
Thank you again for you efforts in solving my problem.

JeffG said:
Hmmm... Well, at least you know it's a local issue now...

I suppose that it could slow it down - especially if some of the
Contacts are corrupted, or something went wrong with the data on
import.

Maybe you could try exporting your contacts and cleaning them
completely out temporarily, and see if that fixes it? You better read
up on doing that before you try it, I'd hate for my advice end up
costing you data along the way.

There is also a utility built-in to OL2003 for PST corruption/cleanup
that you might try - go to Help in Outlook and type in "Scan PST" or
"Inbox Repair Tool" and read up on that, it might help as well.

Make sure you back up your files first ;-)
JeffG

As you suggested, I set my mail accounts for manual send/receive and
disconnected MS Word from Outlook. No change.

Could the Contacts folder slow down Outlook in this way? All of this
started at about the time I imported 500 or so new contacts.

:

Do you have the POP accounts set up on a polling interval and to poll
when you connect (open Outlook)? You might try changing each account
in turn to only communicate with the account servers when you do a
send/receive and see if one of those accounts is the holdup.

I'm not familiar with using OL2003 with POP or HTTP accounts, but I do
know from experience that if Exchange becomes sluggish or
unresponsive, it affects Outlook as well. Maybe one of your providers
is experiencing trouble and your OL settings are passing the buck on
to you in that way...

O, one more thing: do you have Word enabled as your email editor? If
so, turn it off and try it, you could be blaming the wrong application
for your slowdown...

Always more words than help ;-)
JeffG


On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 09:47:10 -0800, "greencw"

It performs the same in safe mode.

:

How does it perform when you start it in safe mode?
Start-> Run; "path to outlook.exe" /safe

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-What do the Outlook Icons Mean?
-Create an Office 2003 CD slipstreamed with Service Pack 1
--

About a week ago Outlook 2003 slowed to a crawl. It takes about 5 minutes
to
open, several minutes to close, and about a minute per incidental click in
between. Composing new messages is next to impossible as the program
freezes
for a few minutes after every few words. Outlook 2003 seems to be the
only
program affected.

This is what I have done:

Disabled Messenger within Outlook.
Checked the size of my .pst files: none is over half a gig.
Checked the free space on my HD: over 30GB free.
Scanned my system with both Adaware and Norton Antivirus: system clean.
Repaired the MS Office 2003 installation from the original disc.

I still have the problem. I have no Exchange Server accounts, just 3 POP
accounts and one http (Hotmail). What else can I do to fix this problem?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
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