shahine.com/omar/

I have this problem on XP but not on Vista.

I see this with a 250mb OST on XP, and my wife sees it (as well as bad perf when doing other things in Outlook 07 on XP) with a PST that is about 1GB.

No problems with O2007 and Vista on Core2Duo, 7200rpm Dell laptop. It's pretty fast. Adding the Outlook Hotmail Connector slowed it down a bit but not my much. At worst, I'm at my Inbox within 7-10 secs of starting Outlook.

I would never willingly buy a laptop with less than 7200rpm drive.

Hate to ask the cliche question, but... Is the file contiguous/defragmented? That's what *always* kills my OST performance. Big time.

I guess it's not just me.

I finally gave up and moved back to Outlook 2003 this week. (Actually I rolled back to the entire Office 2003 suite.) I wasn't using any of the new features and it was quite a bit slower. While I liked the ribbon bar, that alone wasn't enough of a reason to upgrade.

I'm experiencing the same bad performance with Outlook. It takes much longer that Vista boot time, which I find funny. While outlook loads, the window doesn't refresh making you think the app has hung. I know when Outlook will be usable because I get the Meeting + task reminders dialog popup.

Maybe I'll try Greg's suggestion of defragging, but honestly, I don't believe that's the problem. I just wish I knew what the problem was :)

Omar - you have probably already tried this, but...

I have found that running SCANPST against my archive files and either:
a) running SCANOST against my cached file or
b) having Outlook rebuild my cached file from scratch
have an impact on startup. If your data file's really corrupted, you may need to
run your scans several times in a row before it clears out all the errors.

"I would never willingly buy a laptop with less than 7200rpm drive."

I know how you feel - you couldn't pay me enough money to buy a laptop that can't last 5 hours on a single battery. Hey, I guess I don't know how you feel... :)

A few things I've found have helped make Outlook boot up faster:
1. Make sure when you're done using your archive PST's that you collapse the tree back to the root. Outlook then doesn't need to load the PST immediately on boot
2. As the article states, split your PST's. I use a half-year archive and occasionally I will split out a project into it's own PST once it's done and I need to move it off the server.
3. I recreate my OST every 2-3 months. Helps with defrag and any problems. This is especially important if you have large mailbox limits.
4. Make sure you aren't using RPC over HTTP all the time (i.e. don't set the use "on fast network use HTTPS instead of TCP/IP" setting in the Exchange Proxy settings). I find the connection times are sometimes slower and that is what causes the Outlook to appear hung symptom that Trev describes.

Some of the other suggestions have helped (scanning the PST and OST, defrag), but overall, I can't say I'm happy with the direction this is going in. I do find that I rarely close Outlook these days and when I reboot I wait for the background io to finish before Ilaunch it, otherwise my system grinds to a halt.