Outlook, Excel, Work 2007 locking up *BRAND NEW SYSTEM*

[mlb0328]

HP Workstations (XW4600) – Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz - 2GB memory – Dual Monitors –
NVIDIA Quadro 256mb
Windows XP
Office 2007

Just got 9 new HP workstations set up for a small business. All are running
Core 2 Duo, with 2 GB ram. All are running Live OneCare and Smartsync Pro
running for backing up. We always leave these computers on throughout the
night (which should cause no harm at all) with no applications running except
OneCare and Smartsync …
I would say 95% of the time we come in and open Outlook and it seems to
always lock up. And the ONLY way to fix this is to restart. After a restart
it seems to work fine, but without a restart it will always freeze. This is
mind boggling as to why this would happen, and also very irritating.
On top of outlook freezing every morning, excel/word seems to freeze about
25% of the time when opening. We are not running any spreadsheets with macros
or anything like that. We do have a lot of Excel/Word 2003 files that are
located on a server, but to my knowledge office 2007 should have no problems
opening older versions…
Could we be having some kind of conflicts with another running application?
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Like I said, these are brand new computers running Windows XP and Office
2007…this should not be happening…hopefully I didn’t leave any major details
out.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[K. Orland]

Solution 1: Rename or delete outcmd.dat, extend.dat, views.dat and
frmcache.dat. Outlook will recreate these files as needed.

Solution 2: Create a new PST if you use one. Although the Outlook 2007 PST
is essentially identical to the PST format new to Outlook 2003,Outlook 2007
writes additional data to the PST.

Solution 3: Create a new profile. No need to delete the old profile just
yet, just make a new one to see if this resolves anything. If you upgraded,
then it's highly recommended you create a new profile.

Solution 4: Disable Outlook Setup Add-in (Cyberlink). This is the Instant
Office add-in on Dell computers that have Media Direct installed. This
add-in is responsible for converting meeting requests to recurring meetings.

There are some other potential issues that may slow Outlook down as well:

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 may also be an issue in 2007. 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.

If there is a desktop search program installed, get rid of it.

Good luck. Let me know if this helps at all. I would suggest performing
these troubleshooting steps on one PC, one step at a time to see if it's one
of these suggestions that works for you.

 

[dougneb]

Mike,

Are you still having this problem? We're experiencing the same thing with
Dell Optiplex 755's running Office Basic 2007. I loaded a system step by
step, restarting and testing to see what actually locked it up. I think it
has to do with mapped drives not reconnecting properly after login, but I'm
not positive. I thought it had to be a Word 2007 issue because it would
typically hang during Word use - (print preview, etc.) but it wasn't until I
had loaded everything and mapped a couple of network drives that it started
freezing.

Try and disconnect the network drives and run a while without them. Have
you been able to recreate the problem consistently? It was hit and miss with
me but typically I can get it to fail immediately when I restart, log in,
start word, open a doc, type a few things, and then print preview.