Computer hangs and kills Outlook XP repeatedly

[Mad Martian]

I am having a terrible problem right now with my computer - it hangs, mouse
frozen, no control-alt-delete possible, cold boot required. When it comes
back up the Outlook file is hosed and I have to run scanpst.exe, which does
a terrible job (it was written in 1998), so I have to rename a backup
outlook.pst file to outlook.pst, "fix" the broken outlook.pst file under a
new name, and manually move email, calendar entries, tasks, etc to the new
outlook file. A royal pain. I have all updates installed for both Windows XP
and Office XP. My questions are as follows:

1. What settings can I change in Outlook XP that will make it less
vulnerable to these system hangs? I already turned off automatic receive so
I have to hit the send/recive button to get messages. That seems to help as
the last time it happened I didn't have any "lost and found" folders whereas
before I changed that setting I had multiple. However, the file is still
corrupted.

2. What are likely causes of such a catastrophic intermittent system hang?
History: My system (ASUS P4C800 motherboard, P4 3gz, ATI AIW 9800 Pro vid
card) worked fine for 2 months, then the hanging problem began. A video
display problem (garbage pixels) also occured intermittently so I sent the
vid card in for repair. While waiting I used a different vid card (ATI AIW
9600 Pro) and also added another internal fan to the case (Antec Sonata with
380w power supply) - no problem for thee weeks! I thought that was it. Now
suddenly (still with the replacement vid card) the problem is happening
again - once yesterday and twice already today. I ran memtest overnight
without a single problem with the RAM (Patriot PC3200). Any ideas?

 

[Mad Martian]

I should also mention I have the latest ASUS bios and motherboard/chipset
drivers and the latest ATI drivers.

 

[News]

Thinking it might be the motherboard, I swapped motherboards. The new
motherboard had no problems. I put the old motherboard back and it too had
no problems! Only thing I can figure is that the drive cable to that drive
was loose. When I swapped motherboards I also rerouted and replugged a lot
of the drive cables. No crashes for several weeks now.

Hi Martin, yep, mine does the same. Very frustrating, but no-one seems to

be able to help me either. Have asked my ISP and also my computer
technician, but no explanation that is satisfactory to me, particularly as I
am a small business proprietor and my time is important to me. Maybe it is
just a Microsoft problem which needs immediate attention!!!!! Perhaps, the
people at Microsoft can help???????? Yeah, sure!!!!!! Regards, Trish.