Outlook 2003 won't do more than one function at a time.

[Peggy]

Outlook is running very, very slow and can't seem to do more than one funtion
at a time; for example if I am typing a new email to send out and another
email comes in the text stops typing and it must wait till the email comes in
to continue the new email draft.... I have scan disk, disk defrag, anti
virus, registry, spybot and cleaned out the C: file and done detect/repair
and so on and nothing makes it work right; this just started a couple months
ago and is only getting worse, taking longer and longer to type the new email
to send out. Please help...

 

[K. Orland]

There's a bunch of troubleshooting you've already done but there's more as
well.

There are *usually* three major possible causes to the problem:

Instant messenger. The fix is to disable the link to Instant Messenger on
Outlook's Tools, Options, Other tab.

Network connectivity issues when you are using mapped network drives,
including slow networks or inaccessible mapped drives. The fix is to uncheck
the box for the dialog to always ask whether to open/save the attachments or
disable mapped drives.

Alternative input support in Office 2003. This allows you to use speech or
handwriting instead of typing. Disable alternative input following
instructions in How to turn off the speech recognition and the handwriting
recognition features in Office 2003:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=823586

Other options are to archive, run disk checking tools like chkdsk, scandisk
and defrag. There is also the option of running detect and repair from the
help menu. If a PST is in use, run the inbox repair tool. Another step to try
is close Outlook, delete or rename the frmcache.dat, outcmd.dat, and .srs
files. Open Outlook which will then recreate them. If there is a desktop
search program installed, get rid of it.

Don't do everything at once of course, since you won't know if a specific
step fixed your problem or caused a further issue. Test Outlook after each
troubleshooting step you take. Good luck and please let me know how it goes.