There's hope for Outlook 2007 performance sufferers.

If you have been reading this blog by some chance, you know that I took a leap into the void last winter and upgraded to Office 2007. I will begrudingly admit that after getting used to it for 10 months or so, I do like some aspects of the new "ribbon" navigation system. I also still have more trouble finding familiar functions than I do finding my keys in the morning (often no small challenge). Word, Excel and Powerpoint have nudged over into the net gain column; Access still not fun.

As for Outlook, I wrestled with email performance issues most of the year--notably the total lock-up of Windows for 20-60 seconds while Outlook downloads new email. Even small batches.

(Aside: At some point I will probalby move to Thunderbird. I admit that I do like the slick filtering and views that Outlook offers, which would take too much time right now to recreate. )

Out there in the world, enough other folks have commented on this so that I know its not just me, and not by less than a year old, Windows XP, 2 GB, reasonably perky laptop. I also can see that for better or worse, its more than just one thing. Microsoft released a patch last April which helped some people, but not me or not me much.

Kurt Sintaku's blog entry provided a breakthrough for me: http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!2032.entry

I had already done some of the tweaks he suggested, and I went through the rest. What made the most life changing difference for me was uncovering what appears to be a second layer of installed "add-ins" to Outlook. Once I got rid of them, the email function began to work reasonably. And removing which Outlook addin made the most difference overall? An add-in for iTunes. I don't really know what the Apple iTunes addin for Outlook does (maybe someone can comment here), but as soon as that one in particular went away, Outlook perked up like a house plant that you finally get around to watering. And in the time since I found theis, I ended up applying a couple new iTunes updates, and sure enough, Outlook went back to its old habits until I removed the addin again.

Thanks to my buddy Peggy Baker and others with lots of good advice along the way, but thanks especially to Kurt!