inluminent

About once a month, Outlook becomes a pain in the ass for me to use for about 2 hours.

Inevitably, it’ll hang on me while I’m doing something else, or some other process will hang while I’m using Outlook, and Outlook will refuse the shut down properly.

(I’m normally in the middle of about 15 things when this happens).

I’ll shut down the XP box that I use, and let it sit for 20 minutes or so (I guess I’m hoping it’ll get over whatever I did that made it mad at me).

After leaving it alone, I’ll start it back up, and then I’ll try to launch Outlook. It’ll tell me that it wants to start in “Safe Mode” (and I’m like … hmmm, does it normally run in ‘un-safe’ mode?). I’ll let it try, and every-time, it’ll faily to start up properly. I’ll again, leave the machine alone for 20-30 minutes… hoping Outlook will figure out what’s giving it problems, fix it, and then start up… about 90% of the time (or so it seems) it’ll fail to start properly, and will just sit there telling me that it’s “Not responding” (and I’m like “No Shit!”)

So, I’ll shut it down using the “End Process” command on the Windows Task Manager.

And then, I’ll start up Outlook, and it’ll tell me that something is horribly wrong, and that it needs to go into “Detect and Repair Mode”. I’ll click “ok” and then go away for another 20 minutes or so, while Outlook’s installer tries to do it’s thing.

About half of the time it works and Outlook continues to work (although it forgets some of my preferences).

The other half the time, I “rinse and repeat” this whole process.

This whole process happens about once a month, and it costs me around 2-3 hours each time it happens…

What a pain in the ass… total loss of productivity.

I don’t think Apple Mail has ever ‘ceased to function’ on me, and I know that Mailsmith hasn’t ever broken. Come to think of it, OS X has never crashed on me either…

Had to get that off my chest… Thanks for listening