Outlook 2003 memory leak

[sluthy]

Okay, this is driving me up the wall. Just started on as tech support at this company, and this woman's laptop has consumed too much of my (and her) time. We have a typical Windows XP/2003 Server environment with roaming profiles and such, and an Exchange 2002(I think?) mail server feeding Outlook 2003 clients.

This woman was working happily on a desktop but we are slowly migrating to laptops apparently, and as soon as she moved over she's been having problems with lockups, logon issues etc.

1. First thought, clean out her 2.7GB .ost a bit. Archived off half her 3100-strong inbox (main saleswoman, lots of traffic) and compacted, brought it down to 1.8GB. I had heard of a 2GB limit before lag and corruptions kick in so I was optimistic. Nope, still doing it.

2. In the meantime, while I was doing this, I moved half her sent items to a Windows folder, which because one email's filename was miles long (bloody people putting entire message in the header) wouldn't sync with the server and caused her roaming profile to not work on the laptop (heart attack). Luckily I was able to delete the offending email client- and server-side and solved that. Anyway...

3. Still locking up - starts fine, about 30MB to start with. No add-ins AFAIK. The first 1.5 min or so are fine, but quickly it starts when an email is clicked/calendar is selected/folder is selected etc (anything involving navigation, menus and max/minimise are fine however), outlook.exe would rocket up to 100% CPU and start chewing ~80K/sec of memory. This would last about 5-10s the first time, then the next click would last twice as long roughly, and quickly it would get to the point where you just can't wait any longer and the memory's approaching 200MB, and you End Process. In between lockups, if you minimise (like I just did typing this) it will go from whatever is was (76.8MB just now) down to 2-5MB, then jump back up (to 63.5MB just now) on restore.

Just clicked on a new 10KB email, gone to lockup/memory leak, timing it.

This problem only seems to happen at work while plugged in to our local network and server, but it doesn't appear to necessarily be a network mail problem, as I'm currently set to Work Offline and the issue still happens. I have removed most of my .pst files from the Archive Folder list and just left her AutoArchive archive.pst on, and just run Detect and Repair from Help menu, which completed successfully, no joy. It's not currently using the network at all while I'm doing this, so it's definitely a local issue, and occasionally the CPU hogging locks out IE as well.

I really do need to sort this out, as it's really stonewalling our main saleswoman, as well as making me look weak in my first month of employment if I can't sort out this 'simple' Outlook problem. Any prompt replies will be GREATLY appreciated.

7min40s, still peaking, memory at 90MB.

 

[sluthy]

Following advice from another walkthrough I've currently started up Outlook under Safe Mode (Run: outlook.exe /safe), and the reading pane has gone, and from the brief (1-2min) experience I had, I didn't see any lockups. She's currently using it now, and I've told her to call my extension back if it starts locking up again. That was about 10-15min ago so provided she is actually using it and not keeping anything to herself, it sounds like Safe Mode may have at least temporarily solved it. Obviously not an ideal long-term solution but if it works, and can send/receive like normal then I'll live with it for now.

Doesn't change the fact that it doesn't work properly though. I've just been reading about an IE update (931768) possibly causing problems with Outlook and its HTML rendering? It's odd one walkthrough says using the Word editor is a major cause of memory leaks, and another says using Word is the only way to avoid them.

 

[nsafreak]

She has WAY too much in her inbox at 1.8GB and I'm sure that there are other users with large inboxes that are not helping the situation. You need to look into putting restrictions on mailbox size. Or if you can not do that look into an Oxley (sp?) approved archiving solution. The company I work for uses a solution that archives mail off the mail server after a certain time period is reached but it leaves the header in Outlook for easy access.

For reference at home I'm running Outlook 2003 hooked up to an Exchange 2003 server that I manage. Outlook is consuming 7 megabytes of memory and has next to no memory usage. After reading your post I noticed that you do archive emails. Are they archived on the mail server or on another server?

 

[sluthy]

I have archived off everything in her inbox more than 6 months old, which leaves ~1400 messages, and deleted all of the joke attachment emails. It's supposed to do that automatically every two weeks but apparently it doesn't, even though the settings are all right?

I haven't compressed it again after deleting the jokes but it was 2.7GB before archiving the old inbox emails. The archive files (archiveInboxPre20070630.pst, archiveSentItems2007.pst etc) go in the same folder as the normal archive.pst file (which is ~900MB from memory), in the Local Settings/Application Data folder in her user folder on the local hard drive.

 

[nsafreak]

If the archiving is done on her local drive then it could be the culprit of causing slowdowns even when she's not hooked into the network. I believe Outlook will still load the archive PSTs if it needs them. You really want to do a remote archive of those emails that she actually needs anyways. That way if the laptop gets lost or the hard drive gets belly up she won't be without those files. You may want to look into something like GFI Mail Archiver to accomplish this goal. Or if you want to do it without additional software you could script it so that it creates an archive on a weekly basis and that archive gets saved to a network share that is on a different system than the mailserver.

Other than that I'm not sure what else you may want to try. You may want to shutoff the preview pane entirely and just have it setup so that she double clicks to open mails. I've never liked that particular feature of Outlook anyways as its often the delivery vehicle of many viruses & worms.

 

[sluthy]

Yeah, they probably should be on a network server, but for now they're just saved in the default place for .pst files, I'll get that sorted later - I've removed the .pst files (except for the primary archive) from Outlook's list so they're not loaded on startup.

Well, before she left last night we both said "f*** it, we need to sort this", and deleted every email from 2006 and every joke email she had. The 2006 folder alone was well over 5000 messages, and now her mailbox is under 400MB in size (whoa). Haven't compressed it yet, will do today.

The thing is, she can Remote Desktop into the mail server upstate from home and at work, open up Outlook and edit to her heart's content (that's how we deleted that stuff). And she swears that she can work offline in Outlook at home with no lock-ups, it's only plugged into our network, on that laptop, using Outlook that it freezes. ?

 

[sluthy]

Right, status report;

Some juggling between desktop and laptop, now she's solely on her laptop. Compressed her OST, is now down to ~370MB. Before loading onto her laptop, removed every profile bar local admin from the laptop (she'll be the only user) and logged her in. Now, all of her functionality is working at least - she works as per normal at work, takes it home and works offline with her local copy of the roaming profile, then sends her outbox and works on drafts once she gets in the next morning. It all works apparently.

But...it still locks up after ~5 minutes. Reportedly, no more momentary pauses, just after a certain time it goes into 99% and memory eating, necessitating an End Task/Process. At least now it doesn't ask to 'check' the inbox upon every restart now. I haven't tried Safe Mode since reloading the profile, that seemed to help last time. Any ideas?

 

[sluthy]

I just realised I may have come off demanding and unappreciative. Sorry about that, just irritated with this. Thank you to those who have helped so far.

While I'm here, I also noticed one of her PST archives seems to have corrupted in the process. It's still the right size (and in one of the folders I have it in, has two identical sized prf**.tmp files with it). The FIXPST.EXE tool says "fixed, it now has two folders and zero files". Um, no. I've downloaded "Outlook Recovery Toolbox" to have another go, any other suggestions for alternatives?

 

[nsafreak]

Wish I didn't but unfortunately I don't. You might want to try some of the dedicated exchange/outlook sites on the web. Maybe somebody there has run into the same issue.

 

[sluthy]

The boss had a look this morning and reported the same symptoms I've described, but he also noticed that the problem seems to occur the moment total memory usage goes over 256MB, which tells us that the problem might possibly be a RAM issue. We'll change around the memory when we can and report back.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: sluthy
Following advice from another walkthrough I've currently started up Outlook under Safe Mode (Run: outlook.exe /safe), and the reading pane has gone, and from the brief (1-2min) experience I had, I didn't see any lockups. She's currently using it now, and I've told her to call my extension back if it starts locking up again. That was about 10-15min ago so provided she is actually using it and not keeping anything to herself, it sounds like Safe Mode may have at least temporarily solved it. Obviously not an ideal long-term solution but if it works, and can send/receive like normal then I'll live with it for now.

Doesn't change the fact that it doesn't work properly though. I've just been reading about an IE update (931768) possibly causing problems with Outlook and its HTML rendering? It's odd one walkthrough says using the Word editor is a major cause of memory leaks, and another says using Word is the only way to avoid them.

was she loading addons?

 

[sluthy]

No addons.

Now I've thought about it, when diagnosing the problem after clearing out stuff I've tested Outlook with nothing much else running, trying to isolate CPU and memory issues. When I've done this, the problem seems to go away a little bit then come back. Then, when she goes to use it with Terminal Services, Explorer and Outlook etc running it happens quicker. This apparent '256MB threshold' RAM issue is starting to make more sense.

Please don't tell me this could all have been sorted just by adding more RAM... I'd die of shame.

 

[sluthy]

Well, last week after finding a spare laptop the same specs and model as hers (HP Compaq nc8230), we wiped it, logged her onto it and just switched them over, and she hasn't had a problem since. Yay, no more pressure or lost sales! :thumbsup::music: So it doesn't seem to be an issue with her roaming profile.

Then we took aside her old one, I logged my own profile onto it, loaded my Outlook up and everything and ramped up the CPU and memory trying to replicate the memory leak. And...nothing. My entire inbox open, PDF and DOC attachments open, PF usage up over 350MB, and nothing. Just the general slowdown you would expect with ~60 files open. So it doesn't appear to be hardware after all. And Outlook was doing everything fine, so it doesn't appear to be an internal conflict in Outlook.

So, it's not software...and it's not hardware...so it's...? At least it's not urgent anymore, but I would still like to work it out for my own experience. Any ideas?

 

[Rilex]

I don't have a link to the article right now, but we had the same issues with the nc8230 (and other similar models). It was the Bluetooth driver from HP that caused the issue.

At any rate, here are some general Outlook guidelines:
No one folder should have more than 3K items, no matter the size of said items. This does not include subfolders.
Archive PSTs (when doing Auto Archive) are not attached to Outlook and Outlook does not read them. Outlook only reads PSTs that are attached.
Often having >1GB mail in PSTs can (but not will) lead to Outlook perf issues
Never, attach PSTs that are on a network share. Microsoft does not support it and you may break them if there are network issues (not that you couldn't repair it).
Always use File -> Close for exiting Outlook to properly close PSTs/OSTs. Otherwise, while Outlook is finishing wrapping up RPC connections, the UI may freeze and Windows crash detection logic may kill Outlook before it is finished.

EDIT: I went backed and found my notes on this Outlook freeze issue with HP laptops. What we first did was provide users full control over HKLM\Software\Classes\.wid and that resolved it. A "final" update was installing newer Intel Pro Wireless drivers (and I believe Bluetooth software, but can't find that in my notes right now).