I am having an issue with the Exchange account of a person in our company. She uses Outlook 365 to access her Exchange account on our email host. When she attempts to open an email, Outlook will freeze for 5 to 30 seconds. If she already has an email open and she attempts to use the previous or next item arrows, the email will freeze, and a small blue circle will appear for the duration of the freeze.
What happened:
A little over two weeks ago this user's hard drive became corrupted. I installed a new SSD into a spare PC of the same model and specs and configured Windows and patched it up. I then installed all of the normal productivity software including Office 365 which we started using in January of 2020. I configured her Outlook to work with our email host and installed the new PC that evening. I received a phone call the next morning from her and she told me she was having the problems I described above. And there my troubles began.
What have I done to try and fix this:
Please keep in mind I have tried many of these solutions multiple times across many PCs.
-created and recreated profiles about 20 times
-disabled graphics acceleration
-I usually run accounts in cached mode but I have tried both on her machines multiple times.
-disabled all add-ins. Tried add-ins one at a time. It isn't add-ins.
-safe mode. Yes.
-Contacted the host's technical support because I became convinced that the account had become corrupted. The tech set her account up on a VM and connected to the account using Outlook in cached mode. The tech was able to open and close email on the virtual machine without a problem. He insisted that I use AnyDesk to login to the VM to witness that it wasn't the account.
-After that, I configured her old PC with a new SSD. I just installed Windows 10 and Office 365. Same problems.
-After a week and a half into this, I became convinced it was the account and decided to move all of her email out of the account to a PST and delete the account. After I deleted and recreated the account, I sent 6 test emails from various accounts. I had the same problems with just those six in the account.
- This weekend I configured a PC with 32 Gigs of RAM and a M.2 SSD. I installed Windows 10 from an MS installation disk rather than the Dell restoration disk. I installed Office 365 and then configured Outlook. Same problems.
I have spent the last two weeks reading the same solutions over and over again. If anyone has some insights, I am open for suggestions. Thank you.
1. How large is her mailbox?
2. Have you tried having the user login via OWA on O365 to see if it behaves poorly there?
3. Does the user have any "server side" rules setup that could be contributing/causing?
4. Could the user have some other program that is causing a conflict?