Hello,

I have a question concerning an Outlook 2003 Add-in. At our company we
have developed an Outlook add-in which is implemented in quite a few
organizations and is running properly on hundreds of desktops.
Recently we received the request to run our add-in in a Terminal
Server environment (Windows 2003 server). While testing this I have
encountered a strange problem. Outlook seems to 'hangs' for about 15
seconds when starting up and than continues to work properly. All the
functionality of the add-in, as well as Outlook seem to work properly
without any problem. For our customer however this problem is
unacceptable because it significantly increases the startup time and
Outlook is not responding during the 15 seconds 'hang'.

To see where the delay occurred exactly, I have modified the add-in,
stripping the execution of the original functionality and only adding
some log entries to check where the delay occurred. In all the
functions which are called by Outlook when implementing the
IDTExtensibility2 Interface, I have set a log event with a date-time
stamp to see how long each step takes. Here below is the result.

02/03/2007 10:42:43 In Connect Constructor
02/03/2007 10:42:43 Current Tick: 104036226
02/03/2007 10:42:43 Out Connect Constructor
02/03/2007 10:42:59 In OnConnection
02/03/2007 10:42:59 Current Tick: 104051377
02/03/2007 10:42:59 Out OnConnection
02/03/2007 10:42:59 In OnAddInsUpdate
02/03/2007 10:42:59 Out OnAddInsUpdate
02/03/2007 10:42:59 In OnStartupComplete
02/03/2007 10:42:59 Out OnStartupComplete
02/03/2007 10:43:04 In OnBeginShutdown
02/03/2007 10:43:04 Out OnBeginShutdown
02/03/2007 10:43:04 In OnDisconnection
02/03/2007 10:43:04 Out OnDisconnection

As you can see in this log file snippet, there is a 15 second delay
between the constructor of the connect class and the calling of the
OnConnect method. To time more accurate I have set a tick count entry
in the log displaying the current tick count. When subtracting the two
tick counts it is clearly that the delay is 15 seconds (15151
milliseconds to be precise). This is always the same, the milliseconds
vary between 15140 and 15160, but it's quite constant. When running
the Add-in on a normal desktop the difference between the ticks is
always under the 500 millisecond.

It is clear that Terminal Server is having some impact on the Add-in.
However I am unable to determine what is causing it. I have tried to
use different user account (varying from a default user to an
administrator) excluding a rights problem. Also there are no errors or
warnings reported in the event viewer.

My question is:
Has someone ever encountered a similar problem before? Or is it
possible to see what Outlook is doing in these 15 seconds (an Outlook
log perhaps, if it exists).


Thank you in advance,


- Sander Kooij