software, windows

Outlook 2007 is slow, RSS broken

196 Comments

Users are reporting that Outlook 2007 is slow – much slower than Outlook 2003, which it is meant to replace.

Experiences vary, but the worst affected are those with large mailboxes. Large in this context means thousands of messages and several GB size. Looking at the newsgroups there may be a particular problem with Outlook on 64-bit Windows. I’m not impressed; though it’s not yet clear how widespread the problem is. I’d be interested in comments.

Confession time: I have a huge mailbox. That means I can easily find old email correspondence, and that’s a feature I value. Furthermore, I lack the time or patience to sift through and delete what is no longer required. Unfortunately, the most effective advice for those suffering from slow Outlook 2007 installations seems to be: reduce the size of your mailbox.

While there may be good organizational reasons for doing this, it seems odd that it is needed on today’s machines, with vast amounts of RAM and disk space, and unspeakably fast CPUs. And if you use Exchange, be sure that you archive to a server location, otherwise you can end up with several little archives littered over every machine you use, and they likely will not be backed up.

Why should users have to prune their mailbox because the very latest Outlook cannot cope with it as well as the older version? Surely it is not that difficult to query and display emails from a local database?

I’m also disappointed that, for all the talk of user experience, the new Outlook does not slow down gracefully. You know the kind of thing: you start the application and an unresponsive, semi-painted window appears for a while. You click to change folders and the application appears to hang. You click to drop-down a menu and the application freezes for several seconds. Isn’t this the kind of thing that background threads are meant to help with?

As for RSS, I can’t make sense of what Outlook 2007’s designers were aiming at here. Note that I think the RSS central store, installed with IE7, is a great idea. However, “central store” in this context means central to the local machine. What Outlook seems to do is to copy the contents of this store to your mailbox and then keep it synchronized. I think that’s a mistake: mailboxes are big enough already, and Outlook would do better to query the central store dynamically.

The real problem comes when you use Outlook with Exchange. Many users take advantage of the server-side mailboxes in Exchange by using Outlook on several different machines, all pointing to the same Exchange mailbox. For me, this is the primary advantage of Exchange and Outlook. But what if those several different machines have different RSS feeds in their central store, or even the same ones?

So far, it appears that Outlook cannot cope. I end up with duplicate feeds, I end up with feeds showing in the RSS feeds folder that are not listed in Tools – Account Settings – RSS Feeds; in fact this list is empty on my desktop machine, Sync is turned off, but I still have a ton of feeds in the Outlook RSS feeds folder.

It seems simple to me. Either Outlook’s RSS integration should be 100% local, in which case you just see what is in the central store on your current machine. Or it should be 100% server-based, in which case Exchange should handle the RSS updates. Mixing the two is just silly.

Tip for improving Outlook performance: if you are happy to do this, go into Tools – Account settings – Microsoft Exchange Server – Change – More settings – Security, and remove the checkbox from “Encrypt data between Outlook and Exchange”. Other factors may be search engine integration (Microsoft’s or other), A/V integration, or other add-ins.

Bottom line: I suggest caution before rolling this out over a network.

Update: other tips you can try

A few other things that have helped people:

  1. Exchange users: Remove Outlook 2003 and do a clean install of Outlook 2007, making sure that a new offline store is created from scratch.
  2. Run on Vista.
  3. Turn off indexing. Tools – Options – Search options – uncheck all folders. It’s a shame to do this as the indexed search is useful.
  4. Let indexing complete. Might be worth leaving the machine running overnight.
  5. Reduce the size of your mailbox (of course).

The above will not solve all the problems, but can mitigate performance issues.

Further update

Microsoft has posted some official workarounds. See here for comment and link

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196 thoughts on “Outlook 2007 is slow, RSS broken”

  1. One last note, before I removed the addin, I could observe Outlook cycling from 0% to about 50% CPU usage every 3-5 seconds in the Task Manager, that behavior is now gone. Maybe we can’t lay the entire blame on Microsoft but these “addin” providers need to check their work and shame on Dell for loading their systems with so much garbage. It’s my fault for not specifying a clean install I guess.

  2. Outlook 2007 (official release)runs like a total pig, hangs all the time during send receive which goes on for 30 seconds or more even with a 30kb email. All add ins disabled, RSS disabled, checks only one mailbox. I am using Vista. Yesterday I decided to uninstall and reinstall 2003., After doing so 2003 would only start in safe mode! tried everything, repair ect to no avail, in the end I had to go back to 2007 and it runs even more slowly. This is not good . . . . . Outlook has always been my main reason to be using windows instead of Mac but now I am considering just going all Mac because if Microsoft were unable to improe outlook 2007 from the Beta to official release, are they really going to fix these issues with a service pack? Doubtful and it will be months before one even appears. Note to anyone thinking of ‘upgrading’ to Outlook 2007 . . . .DON’T DO IT!

  3. Not to be overly redundant, but this Outlook 2007 is a complete waste of time, and not worth the upgrade. Unless someone can figure out how to fix this with a new version, service patch, or something else, it is not worth the upgrade. My mailbox is not as big as others (about 2.3 GB – since I am constantly archiving due to an error that the box is too large when I get close to 2.5 GB), but even with this, Outlook keeps stalling and hanging. The slow response is constantly happening, not only with send/receive. For example, just going between folders will cause a hang/stall. I get about 400 emails a day, and delete a lot, and file many more. This new version slows my productivity a lot. As an attorney charging by the minute, the wasted time is not worth the new look. Think twice about upgrading. BTW, it can’t be my laptop either, Dell Latitude D420, with dual core 1.2 GHz, and 2 GB RAM.

  4. Mke Bisson suggested this fix for Outlook 2007 when running on Vista (only on Vista folks!):

    Go to Programs -> Accessories and right click on command prompt and select “run as administrator”

    Then type in the following:
    netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

    Seems like there is an issue with the new network stack in Vista!

    Regards

    John

  5. Hello. I just manufactured a Vista 64-bit Home Premium PC for a customer. Outlook 2007 is very slow to start but seems to work okay once it’s started. It takes 28 seconds to load. My God! There’s a Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU on this machine with 2GB system memory.
    The pst file is only a couple of meg with just contacts.
    I remember seeing a Vista demo where once you load a program, close it, it would come back instantly. Not. It still takes 28s to load when run again in the same session.
    I’ve found a few bugs in Vista also but I’ll limit my comments to Outlook.
    Sincerely,
    Dave Schmidt
    Wolfland Computers
    info@wolfland.net

  7. I disabled the Outlookaddin from Cyberlink by running Outlook in Safe Mode and although this resolved the slowness issue, it created other problems within Vista Business, i.e. the Aero feature was lost and the background behind the gadgets became gray. There may have been other issues which I didn’t discover. Ultimately, I had to do a System Restore to fix Windows Vista. This also re-enabled the Outlookaddin in Outlook 2007.

    Does anyone have any experience if I follow the suggestions on this forum to remove the Outlookaddin program through the Control Panel if this might create other problems? I am particularly concerned about removing it versus simply disabling it since once it is removed it is gone and if other problems surface I don’t know how I would reinstall it.

    Thanks.

  8. I gave up and went back to Outlook 2003, man it is good to be home. The speed is great agian and it whips email down in seconds. To bad because Outlook 2007 was pretty to look at.

    Maybe Outlook 2007 Service Pack 2 or 3 will make Outlook 2007 usuable.

  9. YEp same for me 2003 rocked with many pops and 1gb pst, 2007 takes 20 minutes every morning to get my emails all 100K of them via pop.

    compacted, archived, reapired, whatever it just plain sucks under XP (works well with vista) rollback for me too!

  10. I have no idea why Microsoft has not publicized this. It has proven the most ridiculously effectively cure imaginable. All you have to do is open Outlook 2007, click the ‘tools’ tab/ trust center/ add-ins/ “go” (at the very bottom)/ and uncheck ‘outlookaddin.’ That’s it! Hope this helps.

  11. It won’t let me uncheck the box. I get a message that says: “The connected state of Office Add-ins registered in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE cannot be changed.” How do you get around this?

  12. I have no idea why Microsoft has not publicized this. It has proven the most ridiculously effectively cure imaginable. All you have to do is open Outlook 2007, click the ‘tools’ tab/ trust center/ add-ins/ “go” (at the very bottom)/ and uncheck ‘outlookaddin.’ That’s it! Hope this helps.

    That did not fix the problem.

  13. Has the same issue as all the rest. Mine is an upgrade of Office 2007 on top of XP SP2 (Corporate Image of Vista is not ready). I have a single core Dell D420 with 1.5MB RAM. I have broken my message stores to multiple pst’s my date. Performance was very slow compared to Outlook 2003 – just went into the Trust Center and disabled most of the add-ins. I will add one by one back to see which one was the culprit but so far performance has improved. Will keep you posted.

  14. Here’s an interesting one…

    After logging a call with Microsoft, with similar problems with Outlook 2007 not responding, hanging, and generally behaving badly. The engineer and I realised through trial and error (using msconfig to disable all non-ms services and all startup progs and then slowly re-enabling and restarting after each!!!) that the culprit was Skype 3.0.0.198. And now all is well 🙂

  16. I had slow Outlook issues in both 2003 and 2007 and figured out it was due to some pre-installed software from Dell. The software was called Outlookaddin in the add/remove programs control panel and after I removed it, both Outlook 2003 and later 2007 worked perfectly.

  17. No Dell pre-installed sw to remove, Skype not the issue. In fact I’ve done all the ‘cures’ listed on here so far (and other suggestions I’ve found) and Outlook 2007 still hangs horribly for me.

  18. I just thought I’d add my experience for the record. Just purchased a new Quad-core with 4GB RAM and the machine freezes during send/receive with Outlook 2007. My PST file is approx 4GB. I’m running XP SP2.

    Interesting that it’s not because it’s using lots of system resources.

    Amazing considering that OL 2003 never performed this pootly.

  20. I’m in the same boat. I installed a fresh copy of Outlook 2007 (on XP SP2). My 1+GB PST was converted to the new format back when I was running pre-release versions. I, too, thought the performance issues would have been resolved by RTM. I have tried all of the suggestions mentioned, except archiving my main PST. The only very slight performance gain was when I disabled the iTunes add-in (all other addins are disabled except for Qurb/CA Anti-spam…but I had this performance issue before I installed Qurb). S/R still kills my machine due to intense hard drive thrashing. I’m running on a Core 2 Duo T7400 with 2GB of RAM.

    I also ran a little test under the assumption that the upcoming SSDs will be faster than our current hard drives. I copied my PST to a SanDisk Ultra II SD card that resides in my integrated SD reader. I was expecting an improvement in performance, but boy was I wrong! You think Outlook ’07 is slow now? Ha. It ran probably 2-3 times slower using the SD card.

    As another aside, I was running Vista RTM for a while and I don’t recall being nearly as frustrated with Outlook ’07 on it. In fact, for me, most programs seemed to run faster under Vista. Part of it may be because I was using that 2GB SD card as a ReadyBoost cache.

    There are 2-3 more programs that I need to be updated before I can switch back to Vista.

    Wes Hsu

  21. After much fighting, I have speeded Outlook 2007 up to a useable state. It still has major bugs, however.

    Steps so far:

    1 – Disabled plugins for BCM, Unified Messaging, Sharepoint and PDF Maker.
    2 – Turned off attechment preview (Trust Center -> Attachment Handling)
    3 – Turned off header shading and line break mangling (Options -> Email Options)

    Remaining problems:

    1 – Outlook memory usage goes up massively whenever an HTML email is opened. This memory isn’t released when the message window is closed, and goes up further each time.
    2 – Send/Receive still hangs Outlook when syncing up a large set of IMAP folders.

    New problem:

    I’ve had a couple of crash-to-desktop incidents. Not sure of the cause yet, but at least these send telemetry back to Microsoft to alert them to some of the problems.

  22. There’s a related bug with Windows Desktop Search:

    Starting Outlook 2007 unsnoozes the search indexer, causing an immediate drop in performance and additional disk I/O, even though the notification area icon still thinks it is snoozing.

    To stop it again, you have to uncheck and recheck snooze on the notification area menu.

  24. It would be interesting to see if my OL2003 XP workaround helps OL2007 Vista.

    My OL2003 bogs down if I have more than one E-mail account (even if not downloading more than one at a time). One “fix” is reducing to a single E-mail account, but that’s not very practical.

    My “workaround” is to log on to any other XP account (admin or limited) and download the E-mail from the desired account using the “Run as…” option. It turns a 1000 E-mail, 20 minute download into a 90 second download for me.

  25. I almost gave up on Outlook 2007. I also had to install the Windows Mobile Device Centre to synchronise the files of my JasJam PDA. This I thought slowed things downs even more.
    I rang Dell support (my coputer is an XPS m1210) and was advised to uninstall the Outlook 2007 Addin(forgot the real name) from the list of installed programs through the uninstall function on the Control Panel. This Addin is apparently a program provided by Dell and has to do with the MediaDirect function preinstalled in a separate partition on the hard drive. I uninstalled the program and – wallah! – everything works perfectly!
    I hope the technician at Dell will not end up in the hot water for telling me that the Addin is useless and cause conflict between itself and Outllok. Thanks, Mate!

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