Outlook Hangs when Typing Email

Not necessarily your problem, but if you have a virus scanner which is told to dp deep scans on archives, a cleverly crafted archive can cause the scanners to go nuts.

But your issue is with creating the message.

Hmmm.

If you can, load taskmgr/procexp to see what happens when you start typing.

Procexp has more info. Maybe a service is doing something.


Assuming it is a file access thing, use filemon to see what app/files are being accessed.

Make sure you unload all apps and stop all unnecessary services (on the workstation) whilst testing this out.

You don't think this is an exchange issue? I mean - if it happens on all the client machines each with difference configs?

Do the same checks on the server.

Have you had any windows updates/AV updates/firewall rule changes/etc.

Anything different.

See if it coincides with the hanging.

Are they all using MS Word as their email editor? If so, did you get recent office updates?

Its all a case of finding where the problem lies.

But, even after doing all of this, you may find that the problem cannot be easily solved.

Do you have a backup Exchange server? Can you temporarily shift the users to that server?
 

Suggest if you haven't done this already, going into one of your user's outlook properties and changing the mail format to: "Rich Text" and see if that makes a difference.

Might also look to see if it works in safe mode:
Start>Run>Outlook.exe /safe

Would also try running clean profile:
Start>Run>Outlook.exe /cleanprofile

For other Outlook 2003 Command Line Switches that may help:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP010031101033.aspx 

Does this also work for Outlook 2007?