Outlook hangs/freezes when Desktop Alert notification is displayed

[ET0000]

We use Citrix Presentation Server on Windows 2003. This is a very new environment - new hardware less than 6 months old, set up by a professional IT services organization.

Some users have reported that Outlook hangs/freezes for them occasionally when a new mail Desktop Alert is displayed.

This has been reported when a user sent several people a story from the NY Times website as HTML, and also when someone has received emails from people in China. There have been other reports, but without any information on what email caused the problem.

Short of turning off the Desktop Alert function, is there a way to avoid the situation where email content apparently hangs the Alert?

 

[nickpark]

We had a problem where Email scanning was turned on for desktop virus scanners.
Whenever a user received a large attachment, Outlook hung "not responding" while the email and attachment was checked by the virus checker.

Does Outlook hang forever or does it eventually return control to the users?

 

[ET0000]

Users claim that Outlook never returns, and ask that I logoff their Citrix session so they can start Outlook again, but they may just be impatient.

I'll take a look at the McAfee VirusScan settings on the Citrix server.

Some users said that the Desktop Alert window is left around as a rectangle that never goes away (but some have said they were able to see the Alert content initially, it just didn't go away or repaint after it had gone to the background).