Outlook 2007 - Just fix it - My Rant

Warning: Rant to follow:

Ok, I know Outlook 2007 is a complicated piece of software. I know its gone through a whole series of revisions. Could I make a better piece of software? Well I'd like to think so, but the people at  Microsoft are smart people so it could be debatable.

What I do know?

Outlook 2007 is significantly less stable for me than Outlook 2003 ever was and I am sick of it. It complains of being "unresponsive" on a daily basis for me. I don't know what the change is that has caused this (perhaps a windows update?) but I guarantee that Outlook 2007 goes "unresponsive" at least once a day.

Damn its annoying. Outlook acts as the software hub for my my day. It holds my appointments, reminders, meetings, and pretty much my daily everything. Its imperative that this software is reliable. I don't care if no features are added, but I do care that the features that are in there are reliable. Please make it so. I need it that way.

18 Comments

  • I have been running Outlook 2007 on *Windows XP* for a while now and never had any stability issues. Looks like you are running on Vista - could that be the problem? Vista SP1 will be out soon :-)

  • Yep, you have guessed right, I am running Vista. I probably shuld have mentioned that, but I would like to think the core pieces that Outlook 2007 relies upon are more stable, and perform better under Vista than XP. Perhaps its not the case though. Its just so damn annoying, given that I rely on Outlook so much.

  • I have it running on Vista too, and had juste an issue when I installed old 2003 components for the rest it is quite stable!
    You might also try this patch KB933493 : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c262bcfd-1e09-49b6-9003-c4c47539df66&DisplayLang=en

  • Never had a single problem with Outlook 2007, and consider it a great upgrade over 2003. Running it on multiple Vista laptops, 2 PC's and an XP laptop and never have had any issues. My entire office upgraded and the easy sharing of calendars and other information without going through IT and exchange permissions is very useful. No one I know has had any complaints about it. Maybe you are having some other system instability affecting it? Or disk performance? My personal PST file is around 800meg and still no issues.

  • What kind of accounts do you have configured in Outlook? Are you using Exchange in cached mode, online mode? Pop account? IMAP?

    We know there are performance issues in the RTM bits for 2007 that we're investigating for the first SP.

  • Ever since I started using Outlook 2007, the PST file gets "corrupted" and "needs to be repaired". Several of my colleagues experience the same, and its annoying to see the "You may experience performance drop while your outlook file is scanned for problems"-popup every day.

    I'm also dissapointed! :-/

  • Stable high performance software does not sell. Features sell.

  • I find 2007 also pretty poor: when I'm typing an email, and outlook decides to get new mail, my typed characters in the new email aren't entered, the typing stalls... This is so bad, I have no words to describe it. I mean: whoa, MS, was it so difficult to make the mail fetch routine run on a background thread?

    Anyway, it's also dogslow when your .pst files are big. MS suggests to split them up (no, there's no tool of course to do that, you have to manually archive stuff), instead of fixing the cruft.

  • I find that using IMAP and Rss is dog slow. Not only that but outlooks doesn't respect doing more than one thing at a time. i.e. it may as well be single threaded. I'm sorry I spent any money on it.

  • I run Outlook 2007 on both Windows XP and Vista, and I have not had a problem at all. It's interesting to see this.

  • I think most problems with Outlook 2007 on Vista have to do with its integration with the Vista search engine. The one thing I don't like about Vista is that it prevents EXPERTS from tampering with the OS and critical settings, which causes problems like this downstream.

  • Thanks for the comments everyone.

    Ryan, in answer to your questions, I have 1 exchange acct, and 6 POP accts and yes it is using cached exchange mode. I know there are perf issues in Outlook 2007, but the issues are conderably worse in 2007/Vista, than they were in 2003. Hence the frustration. I really hope it gets addressed, and not just addressed, but smashed :-) Additionally, I sometimes uses a 3G dial up link to access my email, although it is only occassionally, and the link itself is quite good. Note that the issues happen whether I am on fast or slow connections.

    Frans, I kind of live with the typing delays and am so used to them now, I almost pause typing in anticipation.

    I have removed all my RSS feeds as I had many issues with that, but I haven't removed all those sharepoint lists so I might try that too.

    Thanks again.

  • Grr, I have installed office 2007 on a vista and xp machine at the church office. This is a multi user environemnt on both machines. XP - No problems - fast, works well. Vista - Outloook keeps trying to reinstall, then saying that a dll file is missing, try reinstalling. Run fix, works for around 5 inutes (slowly), then tries to reinstall and same again. It must be some update, because there is no problem with any other part of office, and it was fine until yesterday, when I added some signatures to outlook. HELP!!!

  • I am close to trashing any slight reference to OL2007 on my computer. OL2007 gets worse every day. Heaven-forbid I leave it open overnight. Guarantee to totally lock up my complete system.
    I run OL2007 on my Windows XP SP2 with all updates.

    At this point I would love to find something that would completely obliterate OL2007 or anything related to it.

    Anybody have any good places to find a fix?

  • I came here from google. Having the same problem when using imap. Just installed outlook 2007 on a almost fresh install of Vista, computer is about 3 weeks old. Imap account only has 45mb of data and on a very reliable 1.5MB DSL connection.

    I'm going to keep looking. If a resolution is found I will post it.

  • Outlook 2007 on XPsp2

    Configured for Exchange and IMAP servers.
    When it updates e-mail, my entire system locks up. I have to wait about 20 seconds and just take a few deep breaths.

    Maybe MS is really interested in my health and wants to force me to relax with this anger management exercise. Yeah, that's it. It's not a bug. It's a feature.

  • I've only had Outlook 2007 running for a few months, but I've had enough and switching to Thunderbird. Outlook was crashing on an hourly basis, causing my pc to lock up and require a hard reset each time.
    I am on XP - and thus suspect that 2007 was intended for Vista, but I don't know of any like minded professional that thinks vista is worth having.

  • It haapens. I had the same problem When I had to shift from Word03 to 07. But does this Outlook07 provide IMAP4 facility?

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