Constant Spinning Beach Ball

[Winters, Timothy]

I have a number of G4 PowerBook and G5 PowerMac¹s running Mac OS X 10.3 and
10.4 getting the spinning beach ball when creating messages and
synchronizing messages simultanelously in Entourage 2004. The All machines
are configured using the EXCHANGE protocol pointing to my Exchange 2003
server. Once the spinning ball appears, users continue to type messages but
the text fails to appear until the sync is completed. It happens very often
and is causing many folks a lot of grief. Most are reporting the
application is no longer functional because it happens almost constantly.

During the synchronizing/spinning, CPU usage spikes to 100%....causing all
processes to halt until Entourage has finished its task. The users don¹t
know this, but it¹s the reason why writing the message is so choppy.

I cannot duplicate the problem with my G4 PowerMac DP 500MHZ running 10.3.9
and Entourage 2004 with the same service packs and configurations as the
others.

All help and ideas are appreciated!!

 

[Jeff]

have you tried setting Spotlight preferences to not search the
Microsoft User Data folder? That fixed this problem for me. - JH

 

[TechMaster_ABM]

SPOTLIGHT suggestion works- yes... but also check your AntiVirus
software. I turned Norton AV 10CE off the MS Data Directory and Voila!
All things back to normal.

Allyn

 

[Jeff]

Good catch - I forgot to mention the NAV issue as well. - JH

 

[Tim Winters]

Thanks everyone for your comments and assistance. I¹ve traced the problem
to an excessive item count within the user account. I have four users
experiencing the spinning beach ball using Entourage 2004 SP2 on both Mac
10.3 and 10.4 systems whose accounts contain between 4800 and 14,000 items.
(Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items, Calendar)

By reducing the count to 2000 or less, the spinning ball is gone, and
Entourage becomes a very usable product.

Your Exchange administrator can provide you with the item count for your
account, or you can sum the total of each folder found in the lower left
corner of the window.

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