"Bob Horton" wrote in message
...
"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
Once again replying to my own post, this is getting stranger. I decided to
back up all my data, since the machine was acting so funky (I do this every
Friday anyway, so it's do big deal). Anyway, I backed up 8 GB of "Stuff"
then backed up the .pst files. My archive and hotmail .pst files backed up
fine. When the machine got about 2/3 of the way through copying the outlook
..pst file, it started doing the same thing that it was doing when I was
attempting to use Outlook, as described below. Has anyone experienced
anything like this? Suggestions? TIA!
--
Bob Horton