Outlook Express takes forever to start

This is a fairly recent development, according to the owner. This laptop has Win XP pro Version 2002(no sp1 or 2). It does have AVG 7.0, Adaware, spybot, spywareblaster, and zone alarm firewall installed. I think that the AVG email scanner might be at fault, but I'd first like to try uninstalling outlook express and reinstalling it. Is this possible? I uninstalled AVG, but that made no difference in the startup of outlook express, so I reinstalled it. Once outlook express finally gets going, it seems to behave ok. Any ideas? Thanks.

 

Do you have a lot of messages saved in Outlook Express? If you have thousands and/or a lot of messages with huge file attachments like movies or sound files or the like, it may be taking quite a while to load the resulting huge Inbox file (or whatever folder they may be saved in).

If so, try saving whatever attachments or messages you want to save in other places and once you've verified they have saved correctly, delete them from OE.

If large files aren't the problem, try deleting the inbox.dbx file. A corrupt inbox.dbx can cause all sorts of problems. If you have any messages in the Inbox, they will be lost, so while in OE, move the ones you want to keep into another folder.

To find the location of the dbx files in which OE stores its data, in OE go to Tools>Options>Maintenance tab and click on the Store Folder button.

Once you know the location of the dbx files, close OE, open My Computer or Windows Explorer, whichever you prefer, navigate to that folder and move the inbox.dbx file to another location (into My Documents, for example).

I suggest you move rather than delete it just in case you need to restore it.

Open OE, which will create a new, empty Inbox, and see if it opens like it should.

 

Outlook express 6 takes forever....

Hi Miz,
Thank you for the reply. Emptying the inbox by way of moving the the inbox.dbx file didn't help. I emptied the deleted folder without any help either. Clicking on the Outlook Express icon on the desktop brings up the blue Outlook Express 6 rectangle, which sits in view for about 30 to 35 seconds. Then, the background, or grid of the inbox appears, but the white inbox content field stays blank for another 35 seconds or so, and then the inbox content appears. Of course, since I moved the inbox.dbx file, the only thing in the inbox is the "welcome to outlook express" letter. I've been using this laptop long enough to have any relevant or semi-important mail also stored on my desktop, so losing the content of the inbox on the laptop is of no serious consequence.
Is it possible to uninstall outlook express and reinstall it?
Thanks again for your willingness to help.
Vic

 

Befpre reinstalling, have you compacted lately?
File|Folder|Compact All Folders

Also, take a look at this site:
http://insideoe.tomsterdam.com/

Hit the "Problems" tab at the top and look near the bottom of the "Errors, Problems and Bugs" page for the "Performance Problems" section. This is a very good site for all things OE and there are some good suggestions here regarding slow startup issues for OE.

Regards,

Erronius

 

In OE>Tools>Options>General tab, make sure "Automatically logon to..." is unchecked. It may say Windows Messenger or MSN Messenger or some other messaging service but whatever it says, it might be trying to fire up the indicated program and having problems.

I just dealt with the same problem on a client's computer and it turned out they had uninstalled Windows Messenger but left that box checked.

 

Outlook Express is back to normal

Just wanted to say thanks to Miz and Erronius for their kind suggestions.
What fixed the problem for me was the suggestion on the insideoe.tomsetrdam website that involved setting two values in the registry to blank(s) after having deleted messenger services.
Thanks again, and kindest regards. Vic

 

Glad it worked out.
Thanks for posting back - good stuff to know.

Regards,

Erronius