Outlook 2010 Not Responding

Yes, I know.  This is not really a SBS issue, but since I have run into this problem myself, I discovered that an awful lot of users are having similar symptoms.  And because I solved it, I thought it was worth a share with my readers.

Background on the Issue

First, here are the symptoms.  You have installed Outlook 2010.  Everything seems OK, but then all of a sudden, clicking on a folder or message, or during a send/receive, the little blue circle of death starts and never stops.  You try and end Outlook with Task Manager, but it hangs around for five minutes or more. You just live with it, but soon even Task Manager can’t kill the beast.  If you start Outlook again and look in Task Manager, you will see two copies of Outlook running.  The newer one will have a small memory allocation, and the splash screen will continue to read Loading Profile.

In my case, it got even worse.  Trying to end Outlook eventually produced a message box that said, essentially, cannot end task access denied. What’s worse. re-starting the OS proved to be a problem as well.  It simply refused to get past logging off.

Let me start the discussion about fixing this with a bit about the ecosystem in which I was running.

• SBS 2008, Exchange 2007 but SP2 applied
• Client Machine Windows 7 Ultimate
• Office 2010 Pro Plus installed

I kissed a lot of frogs on the way to finding the prince that fixed this, but I caution you that some of the things that didn’t work for me may in fact be the culprit for your system.  I’ll review those for you at the end of this post.

What Didn’t Work

The standard things to do include the following:

• Your profile may be corrupted.  Try deleting the profile and creating one that is brand new.  Control Panel -> Mail will let you manage the profiles.
• Run Outlook in Safe Mode. (Hold the Ctrl key down when you click on Outlook from the Start menu).  If it works fine in safe mode, the culprit is likely an add-in.
• Completely remove Office (including traces of previous versions) by using the utility at Microsoft Assistance and choosing the Office version you have.  Re-install Office.
• It might be another program you have installed.  Good luck with that…

What Did Work

You can correctly assume that I hacked at those methods and more, and did so multiple times.  I was just facing up to preparing my system for a farewell, wiping the drives and re-installing when I tried a new approach.  In order to understand what I did, you need to know a little more about my Outlook profile.

I had two mail accounts set up.  One was my Exchange email account, and the second was an IMAP account pointing to the Exchange email account but with a different email address.  I do this because I want to be able to send email from two different accounts, but all goes into the same place (wish this were directly supported by MSFT, but I understand the possible security issues).  Additionally, I have several other Exchange email accounts for other users open, and lastly a few .pst files of archived data and miscellaneous information.

I seemed to be having security and permissions problems about the same time as the not responding problem surfaced, but I had only a vague sense of this, nothing hard core I could spot.  For example, I would get some weird certificate errors but I know that my server certificates were just great because I re-keyed and re-installed them.  As well, no other users were having that issue.  I would also randomly get a message that my .pst folders were not reachable, although I could easily browse to them.

After exhausting the uninstall/re-install scenario a few times, here is what I did:

1. With Outlook not running, I used Control Panel->Mail to delete my profile and created a new one.
2. The only thing I put in the profile was the Exchange account.  I started Outlook and all was well.  Left it that way for several hours with no problem (not responding had started to happen within 5 minutes).
3. Then I changed the properties of the Exchange account to open other emails, one at a time.  Still, no problems.
4. I added the IMAP account.  No problems whatsoever.  That included all of the certificate errors.
5. I added one of the .pst data files.  And sure enough, about ten minutes later, Outlook stopped responding.
6. I rebooted, then removed the data file from my profile.  I then copied the two .pst files I use from a shared network location to local storage.
   
7. I opened Outlook again, then opened one of the .pst files from the FILE tab.  I right-clicked on the data folder in the left hand navigation tree, chose data file properties and then clicked on the advanced button. When the next box opened I clicked on Compact Now and waited for a bit while it did its thing.
8. Then I waited.  No problems arose.  I then did step 7 for the second .pst file.
   

I can report that not only has the not responding problem gone away, but so have the security-like issues.   What’s more, Outlook “seems” to run much smoother and faster.  It has become great to use again pulling me back from absolute dread at clicking on something and seeing it not work.

My Analysis

The most important take-away from all of this is that a step-by-step, elimination method yields the best results.  Along the way, I actually tried this by using Safe Mode, or starting Windows with start-up processes disable and by killing other tasks to see if they would allow Outlook to end.  None gave me any results, so I then shifted to the uninstall and reinstall scenarios.

When that didn’t work, I was down to two basic choices: something with the setup (read profile) for Outlook, or some other system setting (think registry or .dll for example) caused by another program being installed, not in the right order, etc.  For most of us the latter problems would be best addressed with reinstalling the OS and exercising care about what programs to add back in.

Hating the idea of the latter, I decided to attack the profile in the serial fashion I described to you.  And it worked.  I suspect that something in the .pst files was causing an issue, although it could be something about their characteristics change when I copied them.  To verify this, I am going to return them to their former network share location and see if everything still works OK.  I will post and let you know.

Could it be that the whole issue was just the .pst files?  I am going to vote yes on that for one reason:  the symptoms became progressively worse.  The first few times it happened, it was over a period of several days, and no other pop-up warnings.  It progressed to happen within 5 minutes or so.  During that time, the .pst files were changed by moving more email into them.

I went back to the forums where I found many users reporting this problem.  It hit me like a ton of bits: every single one I reviewed were using .pst files.  Maybe there is more, but this seems a good place to start.

If you are having similar symptoms, I suggest you start with compacting your .pst files.  If that alone doesn’t work, just for grins, copy them to a new location.  I assume that will do nothing, so the next step would be to delete your profile and create a brand new one.  Only then would I do the uninstall/reinstall.  And also for grins, at each one of these steps, do the .pst file compacting.

And let me know:  “How’s that not responding thing workin’ out for ya?”