Outlook 2003 extremely slow

[benbino]

We recently upgraded our Windows domain to native 2003. We're running Windows 2003 Server, Exchange 2003, and Outlook 2003 on XP workstations. Outlook is suddenly running very slowly on several users' machines since we performed this upgrade. The symptoms are as follows:

-- It sometimes takes minutes to open the Outlook Journal.
-- Typing an address in the To: area, where Outlook begins to provide you with several options makes Outlook hang for 90 seconds or so.
-- It will sometimes crash outright.
-- Outlook hangs at times for almost two minutes, and then produces the following error:

"Outlook is not responding If you are using an Exchange Server email
account, you can cancel pending server requests by clicking the Outlook icon
in the notification area, and then clicking Cancel Service Request on the
shortcut menu."

These problems are not network-wide, only on a small percentage of the computers. Thank you in advance for any help!

 

[2cornot2c]

Do all the client workstations have the same hardware specs?

Try switching things around, try setting up the email account of the user that you are having problems with on one of the workstations that is working fine. Try setting up an email account that is working fine on one of the workstations that is having problems. What happens? does the good account have problems on the workstation with problems or does the email account that was having problems work well on the good computer.

Update me!

 

[xmsre]

"-- It sometimes takes minutes to open the Outlook Journal.
-- Typing an address in the To: area, where Outlook begins to provide you with several options makes Outlook hang for 90 seconds or so.
-- It will sometimes crash outright.
-- Outlook hangs at times for almost two minutes, and then produces the following error:"


What method did you use to move the mailboxes to Exhcnage 2003? It sounds like you used exmerge. Try:

1. From the client, remove the outlook address book service from the client profile.
2. exit outlook 2003
3. add the outlook address book service back to the client profile.


Outlook stores two references to the old server under the contab guid in the outlook profile, 11026620 and 11026626. These are basically entryids to the users old mailbox store and contacts folder. Removing the OAB service clears these, and adding it back pulls new references from the exchange server.

 

[benbino]

Thank you both for your post. It may indeed be hardware related, since only two people are experiencing the problems. We're also having a problem on one of the machines, with Microsoft Word 2003 also running very slowly at points (this since the upgrade). Strange coincidence...

I'll do some testing and let you know what I learn.

 

[KSLtechie]

I've had the problem with Outlook behaving very slowly on client machines. But only in the afternoons!! I noticed that in Task Manager Outlook was using 100% of the cpu..

I ended the process and restarted Outlook and it was fine again. However I still have not yet found the underlying problem as yet. Once I do, I will add the fix.

Cheers