Outlook 2003 slow to open first emails

[John]

Outlook 2003, running on Windows XP with service Pack 2, was set to
open in the inbox. For some while now I had noticed that it was
rather slow. In fact, it would take 20 seconds to display the first
e-mail, regardless of whether this was in its own window or in the
reading pane and for this time took CPU use to 100%. This also applied
for the second e-mail but all subsequent e-mails displayed
immediately. This applies to all email folders and on a slower machine
(this 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB RAM) could easily lock the machine for
minutes.

After a lot of investigation I was able to work out that this only
occurred if the first e-mails to be displayed were in RTF or HTML
format. They displayed immediately if in plain text. Please note that
this has nothing to do with the presence of attachments or remote
images etc.

Curiously, I also found that if Outlook was set to open on the Outlook
Today page then this problem did not occur, even if I went straight
to the inbox after starting Outlook and well within the 20 seconds
lockup time that would have applied if I had opened Outlook in an
email folder.

I havent been able to defeat this problem. The obvious workaround is
simply to leave Outlook set to open on the Outlook today page but I
would be interested to know if anyone else has observed this and if
there is a fix for itso that I can have Outlook open in the inbox,
which is where I would prefer it to be.

Thanks

John
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[mikecarno]

Outlook 2003, running on Windows XP with service Pack 2, was set to