Outlook 2003 slowness specific details please help

[csum77sp]

Hi all Outlook gurus. I've got one that has me stumped. One of my
clients has Outlook 2003 SP2 installed on a notebook (core duo T7200,
2gb ram, WinXP Pro sp2, 66% free hard drive space on a 68.9GB
partition). Connecting to an exchange server having all exchange mail
delivered to a local pst. PST is 694.5MB (kind of big, but I've had
bigger work better than this is).

Outlook seems to go through cycles of responsiveness &
unresponsiveness. Specifically, about 5 seconds of responsiveness,
followed by about 5 seconds of unresponsiveness...unending. I can be
working online, working offline, in the big pst, in the ost file
(which only has some junk mail messages in it and is only 761KB).
Nothing seems to make a difference.

I have disabled the Person Names Smart Tags, disabled junk filtering,
disabled the remove extra line breaks, disabled two add-ins (Google
Desktop Search & I-Tunes [no idea why I-Tunes needs a plug-in in
Outlook!??!]), compacted the pst & ost files, rebooted, made sure the
laptop is plugged in , etc. Tried Preview Pane on or off. Tried
cached vs. non-cached Exchange mode. Defragged the hd (Outlook pst has
0 fragments).

This effects anything in Outlook. Trying to change messages. Trying to
open menus. Trying to click buttons on menu popups (like Tools ->
Options).

This is a new laptop. This PST file was moved from a prior computer
(also running Outlook 2003) about a week ago. Problems didn't exist on
prior computer...they're new to this one. This slowdown doesn't seem
to effect anything else in Windows...all else looks good.

IF, however, I change the mail delivery folder to be the default
Exchange Mailbox (as opposed to the PST) it behaves normally.

I'm at a loss as to what makes the diff. As i said, I've worked with
larger PST files that don't have this problem. Perhaps that's the
anomaly? Also, I've tried to include everything pertinent that i could
think of, but I may have missed something. Let me know if there's some
needed info that I've left out and I'll get it posted.

Any help/ideas/etc. are GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks!

-Charlie

 

[nacari]

Hi Charlie,

I'm having exactly the same problem and I guess it is due to the high amount
of appointments (most of the recurring) of my client. Actually if I empty all
of them Outlook behaviour goes back to 'normal', although it still doing
something every 5 seconds it only takes a maximum of 5-7% CPU instead of
35-50%.
In any case, is there any way to solve this issue withouth having to delete
appointments?

Thanks,
Nacari.