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MS Outlook 2007 hanging/ crashing and hung emails problem

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ee01akk

MIS
Dec 3, 2008
19
GB
OS: Windows XP SP3

Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007

Outlook 2007 connected to a hosted Exchange server.

80% of the time I'm finding that whenever I try to send an email (external address or internal to our company), it will sit in my outbox waiting to be sent. At the bottom of Outlook I cannot see any notice saying "send/ receive". If I click send/ receive all manually nothing happens. Sometimes Outlook will hang shortly after this requiring the application to be stopped by Windows task manager. The only way I can send the email is if I close down Outlook completely, then re-open it go to the outbox and do a send/ receive and the email always get sent that way.

I also find that closing down Outlook never stops the OUTLOOK.EXE process from running and I have to manually kill this process in task manager after closing Outlook down properly in order to start it up again.

There is no anti-virus running on my machine, and no Outlook add-ins are causing this problem. In fact I replicated the problem by starting up Outlook in safe mode using the "/safe" switch and emails still continue to hang and the .exe process never stops automatically on closing. Receiving emails is usually fine, although I find that there is a long lag before I receive them.

The timestamp on the email is usually 10-15 minutes earlier than when it arrives indicating that emails must be arriving but Outlook does not show them straight away. The hosted Exchange server does occasionally drop and reconnect connections however everyone else in our office who are on the same LAN and share the same internet connection seem to receive emails much earlier than me and do not have problems with sending them.

To rule out any corrupted .pst and .ost files I have run the scanpst and scanost on all the data files in my profile and all show no errors. I have attempted a repair of my Office 2007 installation and no errors were found. My last resort is a complete reinstall but this would take a lot of work exporting emails to .pst files, backing up calendars, address books etc and I'm not convinced this will solve the problem.

I've checked the event logs and I cannot see any system or application errors at the time the application crashes or the emails get hung in the outbox.

The laptop has sufficient RAM (2 GB) and it has an Intel Core 2 processor 2 GHz. The OS never freezes and is never overloaded, CPU utilisation is always low and this problems if only Outlook is open so resources are not the cause.

Can you suggest anything or has anyone ever experienced something similar to this before?

Thanks.
 
Can you try creating a new user profile, and run from there? It sounds like a corruption issue to me. That could be just a random issue, but it could also be hardware related. Whether or not the new user profile works, you may want to do (or have done) these things:

1. Run a Windows disk check on your hard drive.
2. Check the Windows Event Logs for the System.
3. Make sure your drivers are up to date - particularly the chipset and/or network drivers at this point. If the system is using the default Microsoft drivers that came with Windows, you may need to download the manufacturer's drivers, and install them.
4. Run Memtest from or from a separate download.
5. Run some HDD diagnostics on the hard drive - there are at least a few on the ultimate boot cd.
6. Maybe run a whole system burn in test that would test everything just to be sure, though I doubt this will turn up anything.

And you said no antivirus at all? You NEED an antivirus app. If this is in an office environment, whomever is responsible for setting these things up needs to make sure Antivirus is instatlled on every PC. That's a no brainer.
 
Back when I still used Outlook, having multiple instances of the program was a common issue. Like you I had to "kill" the extra instances in Task Manager. It was usually noticed when email was still being received even though the program had been closed. We had narrowed down the problem to either a spam filter, anti-virus program, or a combination of the two.

We never did investigate any further, but this might give you some idea of where to start.


Lyle
----
I reject your reality and substitute my own. (Adam Savage)
 
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