"Bob Horton" wrote in message
...
Hi!
I have a machine with an MSI MB, Athlon 32 3200+ processor, 1GB of ram,
Norton Systemworks 2003, and Office 2003. The machine works fine until I
open Outlook 2003 (this problem is new, but I have opened and used all
other software before opening Outlook to make sure that the behavior only
happens after Outlook has been opened). The behavior is a bit difficult
to describe. Basically, the whole machine stops responding (freezes) for
a few seconds, then you can move the mouse around but nothing happens (the
machine doesn't respond to any imput). I've been screwing around with
this all day. During this process I've learned by opening task manager
before Outlook that every 17 seconds some process hits the processor at
100%; otherwise the processor load is 0%. Due to the "freezing" I haven't
been able to tell what process is involved. I do know that the size of
the Outlook memory process keeps growing (to over 85MB. Also, there
appears to be 2 instances of Outlook running in the task manager (which I
just noticed right now -- this message has taken about 20 minutes to type
between freezes). I've Googled everything I can think of other than the
myltiple instances, which I am going to try right now. Any suggestions
would be greatly appreciated.
--
Bob Horton
OK, I started OE first so that I could key this message in peace
. Please
accept my apologies in advance for replying to my own post, but I was so
frustrated before that I sent the post out without including all relevant
info that I can think of. My Norton AV is NOT set to scan emails (belt and
suspenders), MS Word is set to be my email editor and has been for a long
time. The only add-in that I have is a duplicates remover for Contacts that
has been installed for at least a year with no problems. My problems began
right after I installed the MS WMF patch. I attempted to restore to an
earlier time but got the dreaded "your machine cannot be restored..."
message, which probably means that I don't have any valid restore points out
there. After watching the application stab in task manager for awhile, the
second instance of Outlook 2003 pops up when the status changes to "not
responding". FWIW, it will change back to "running" and the second
application instance will disappear for a short time, but it comes back
after a very short time. During that time (I'd guess 15-30 seconds),
sometimes the machine is usable, sometimes the cursor is stuck and showing
the hourgalss, other times it moves freely but no applications respond to
input. There is never more than 1 Outlook.exe process running. Interesting
enough, it just keeps growing in size; the time I watched for about a
half-hour, it reached 120 MB, then the machine flickered and the process
size went back down to about 8 MB (with no impact on system performance that
I can see). Again, FWIW, I can use all the other applications on the
machine basically forever with no problem until I open Outlook 2003, then
all the symptoms are there. I usually wind up having to manually shut down
the machine at that point, which means that Outlook scans the .pst and
archive file when the application is restarted, but I can't see any other
way to get back to a usable state (at least in one lifetime). This machine
is networked in a simple workgroup; no Windows Server product is being used.
In summary, the only change that I can identify was the MS patch, and I
can't just use system restore to call a mulligan. Again, any thoughts would
be greatly appreciated.
--
Bob Horton