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Outlook 2003 slow opening messages with images.

Our 50 user domain was recently upgraded to Outlook 2003 clients with an Exchange 5.5 server. All emails with images open in Outlook extremely slow. I thought perhaps when we upgrade to an Exchange 2003 server (more recently) the problem would go away. It has not.

All of our users seem to be experiencing the same problem.

I can't find anything like this in the MS Knowledgebase.

Does anyone have a documented reason why Outlook 2003 is much slower (in this context) than Outllook 2000?

Thanks for any help.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Karen Falandays

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grclark78

ASKER

Service Pack2 could be an issue. I'll give that a try.

rgford

Grclark, we had this problem (set up almost exactly the same as yours give or take a few nodes). Everything points towards it being a sofwtare issue (almost like a particular update had messed things up) but there's nothing that inplies this (CPU of machines not maxed out, HDs clear etc). I really was a bit stumped, but came to the conclusion that it simply must be network congestion, and the new version of outlook being more bandwidth-heavy. Instead of getting a quote on some fiber-backbone switches, someone recommended turning on "cached mode" for each user (you can do this in group policy with the right ADM files). Microsoft first encouraged this for laptop/mobile users with aporadic connections, but it seems to have been pushed more and more for the general enterprise. I think the reaso for this is that most corporate machines have piles of disk space but networks are becoming more congested; cached mode takes a copy of the exchange mailbox and stores a mirror on the local machine, just using the network version when it updates.

George

grclark78

ASKER

rgford:
Cached mode isn't the answer. I set it all in cached mode upon initial installation.

We have plenty of perimeter security, scanning, etc., so I have experimented with and have now implemented the suggestions from "kfalandays".

Thanks to you for the effort to help me.