I had this problem and after searching a bunch of newsgroups, found an
easy fix that worked for me as well as what others did. I wanted to
give back by summarizing what I found because this was driving me
insane. All credit goes to "Eddie Kasper" since I found the solution
that worked for me in his post in microsoft.public.outlook.general in
the thread entitled "Outlook 2003 Slow/Doesn't connect to Exchange
after May Windows Up".
Description and symptoms:
Problem is described as slow Outlook, slow HTML mail, slow sending/
receiving, and most notably that characters typed show up on the
screen long after they are typed (a few seconds for some, to as long
as 15+ seconds in my case).
Problem seems to be related to the KB931768 patch from 5/8, which is
an IE7 fix hint hint IE7, HTML email:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931768
Problem seems to be mostly or exclusively in Office 2003's Outlook and
not in the 2007 version.
Problem is not related to the email system being used (e.g. Exchange)
but to the Outlook client itself and how HTML mails are rendered on
the screen.
Solution that worked for me:
If I select (left-click) Outlook Today once the problem goes away. I
haven't got the slightest idea why. If I do this, I'm fine. If I
close Outlook and restart it, HTML mail is slow again, and returns to
normal if I go to Outlook Today just long enough for that screen to
pain and then right back to my Inbox. My Outlook normally opens on my
Inbox. I never use "Outlook Today".
Solutions others used that they claimed fixed the problem:
1) Uninstalling KB931768 (Implies you also avoid/exclude it and/or
stop Windows Updates, which isn't so good.)
2) Right-clicking on your "root" email folder (Outlook Today), then
properties, Folder Size. This did not work for me. It was claimed
that after doing this once the problem resolved, however I suspect the
person selected Outlook Today by left-clicking it (which solves the
problem by itself for me) then did the right-click/properties/folder
size and decided that was what helped.
3) One person said turning off Phishing checker in IE7 and then re-
enabling it fixed this (I didn't try it).
4) Many folks used System Restore to roll back to a time before the
patches, which is probably the same as uninstalling KB931768 to some
extent, but also probably kills some of the positive benefits of the
other, non-implicated patches that came out the same day.
My troubleshooting, in case it helps:
How I isolated this to HTML mail is that first thing, I tried to reply
to a mail that was HTML and my typed response came out incredibly slow
on the screen (as above). As I was puzzling over this (I'm the
network admin here and expected people to begin appearing with this
problem any time) someone else showed up with the same issue. Then
another. I found that new mail I composed did not have this
slowness, and put together that I use Plain Text format for my mail by
default. Tests showed that messages in Plain Text and Rich Text don't
display the problem for us here, but any HTML email (newly composed,
a response to or forwarding of an HTML mail, which is by default an
HTML mail) exhibits the problem. So the easy workaround in the short
term was not to use HTML mail or to convert a message down to another
format before replying/forwarding etc. Later I found the "solution"
above, which seems to be waiting for a patch-to-the-patch from
Microsoft to address.
