Outlook 2003 is slow

Outlook 2003 is slow and sometimes crashes. I've brought files up from several earlier versions of Outlook. The pst file is about 105 megs.

 

More

Any activity in Outlook (opening an email, Send/Receive, selecting multiple emails, deleteing attachments) causes the application to slow down. Occasionally, the application will freeze altogether. I have to quit the application and open it again. There are no error dialog boxes. It just freezes. If I check Windows Task Manager, it shows that 100% of the CPU is being used. This isn't happening for any other application. Would a hijack this log help?

Thanks.

 

Have you ran the inbox repair tool on the pst that was from an earlier version?
There might be some corruption in there causing the slowdown.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/272227

 

scan complete - no errors

Ran scanpst.exe. No problems found. However, I had to log out completely and log back on before the scan would run; it said the pst file was still in use, even after Outlook was closed.

Also, I deleted a number of attachments and emails, reducing the size of the pst to 55 megs. Still, it's slow.

Cael

 

That's most likely because outlook.exe was running in task manager. Next time, just kill the process.

Have you tried:

Creating a new profile?

Repairing?

Uninstall/Reinstall?

Looking for disabled items? Open outlook, go to help, About Microsoft Office Outlook, then click disabled items

Using any third party toolbars? (adobe, snagit, etc..) Try removing those and testing.

Is word your email editor? If so, uncheck and test

Try changing the format of your emails from HTML to rich text, vice versa..

Tools, options, Mail format for the above two...

Also, there are several command line utilities you can run. My favorite is:

Click Start, Click Run, type in:

outlook.exe /resetfolders and hit enter

You can also run outlook in safe mode by:

outlook.exe /safe and hit enter and test from there.

 

Running Better

With the reduced size of the .pst and after running the repair utility (though it said it found nothing) and various anti-malware/spyware/trojan apps, it seems to be running faster. Thanks.

 

Hi Cael,

you don't mention one important thing anywhere, what file format is your outlook 2003 PST file? New or old? You mention you have moved pst's up from older versions of outlook, I suspect your PST's are still in the non-unicode format, the native 2003 format is unicode which is not backward compatible and is also not restricted to 2GB in size. I am running a 2.5GB PST accessing a POP box and have no speed issues. You can easily tell, click on "tools ", "options ", "mail setup ", "data files ", if they are 2003 native it should say "personal folders" if its an earlier version it will say "personal folders (97-2002). in the menu help option you can find info on this using PST as your search string.

Cheers Monty