Insanely slow Shutdowns of Outlook 2007 after SP2 upgrade...

[PattyC]

While the startup time and general performance of Outlook 2007 seems to
improved with SP2, the shutdown times appears to be significantly worse.
With cached mode enabled, a 600 meg OST and 1 large PST loaded (3.5 gigs) ,
we are seeing shutdown times in the 4 minute range.

The 4 minute duration has the following characteristics:
- Black "x" icon in bottom right of screen
- Very heavy disk i/o taking place - almost constant
- The timestamps of the ost and pst are 2 and 4 minutes respectively after
I've clicked the Red X to close outlook.

So far, the only way to avoid the long shutdown is to run the client in
Online mode (not cached) and not load the pst. Running cached with only the
OST is taking about 2 minutes to shutdown. And we are seeing this on
multiple machines that have upgraded to SP2. Same symptoms - heavy drive I/O
after clicking the Red X. It certainly appears that Outlook is trying to do
something to the OST and PST's on shutdown.

To eliminate all the usual culprits, here are the diagnostics we've gone
thru (all to no avail):

- All addins disabled
- All startup programs in XP disabled (eg X1, Symantec, ActiveSync, etc)
- Defraged the drive
- Scanpst run on both the ost and pst file
- Contig run on both the ost and the pst file
- Compacted both files
- Created a new profile
- Run Outlook in Safe Mode
- Tried accessing Outlook in “Work Offline†mode and staying offline for the
entire session
- Checked the XP application logs and see no errors pertaining to Outlook or
any errors at the time of shutdown
- Enabled logging in Outlook to see if anything shows up – only see the
following in the logs at the time of shutdown:

o 2009.05.01 15:51:04 HELPER::Uninitialize called
o 2009.05.01 15:51:04 MAPI Status: (-- -- ---/--- -- ---)
o 2009.05.01 15:51:04 MAPI XP Call: TransportNotify(END_IN|END_OUT), hr =
0x00000000
o 2009.05.01 15:51:04 MAPI XP Call: TransportLogoff in EMSMDB.DLL, hr =
0x00000000
o 2009.05.01 15:51:04 MAPI XP Call: Shutdown, hr = 0x00000000
o 2009.05.01 15:51:04 Resource manager terminated

Short of uninstalling SP2, does anyone have any other ideas? Is anyone
using Outlook 2007 SP2 in cached mode with a semi-large OST and a large PST?
Are you seeing the I/O and the black Outlook icon in the bottom right tray
when shutting down?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Thx.

 

[Kaz]

I too am experiencing the same slow shutdown issue with Outlook 2007 after
the SP2 upgrade. My stats:
1. Windows XP, SP3
2. MS Office 2007
3. IE7
4. Mozilla FF 3.0.10

The slow shutdown is inconsistent. I will always receive the Black "x" icon
after closing Outlook , but the delay can vary between instant to minutes to
not shutting down at all. The latter requires killing the Outlook task in
the Task Manager. I have also tried closing via various methods - click on
X, File-Exit, and Alt-F4 and there is no difference. I have not been able to
determine if there is a conflict with other programs that remain open such a
Firefox or other.

The issue will go away if I remove Office SP2 and go back to SP1. However,
I do like the better response of Outlook with SP2 installed. I have used
scanpst.exe to look for issue in my main Outlook PST file as well as the many
others I have. Although repairs have been made on some PST files, it does
not seem to impact the slow shutdown. I closed some PST files and now have
only my main Outlook PST plus four others open. Will work with this for a
few days to see if minimizing the number of PST files open has any impact.

I have another computer that has Vista Premium SP1 with Office 2007 SP2 and
closing Outlook does not exhibit a slowdown issue. This computer has the
main Outlook PST file plus one other PST.

 

[PattyC]

I tracked our issue down to X1 - and specifically, X1's real time indexing of
"files" and "e-mails".

If, in X1, real time indexing is checked for either files or e-mails, X1
will load an x1filemonitor.exe at startup - even if you don't load the X1
client!

This x1filemonitor.exe was causing some sort of conflict with Outlook 2007
SP2 shutdowns. The shutdowns were slow due to heavy disk writes to the ost
and pst files during shutdown... only when x1filemonitor.exe was loaded.
Shutdowns from 2-4 minutes were common in this scenario.

When we unchecked real-time indexing in X1 and made sure that
x1filemonitor.exe wasn't loaded, the shutdowns dropped to 15-25 seconds
consistently.

Hope this helps anyone who runs into a similar issue down the road.