More Outlook Questions
 

HI Gaucho,

1. An outlook profile is basically how Outlook bundles together lots of information that are pertinent to your "account." Creating an "identical" profile, in other words, one that has esentially the same information as before will work for testing purposes. You don't have to delete the old profile at all, but most people do in fact delete the old profile once they are confident it is no longer needed.

2. If you are having trouble finding scanpst.exe, try using the search function in start --> find/search. If this helps, mine is in C:\Program Files\Windows Messaging. The actual path depends on many variables .. but if you really can't find it, if you can find it on another PC, email it to yourself. It is a standalone file that doesn't have to be "installed"... just have to "run" it.

3. Detect and Repair, as far as I know, only attempts to repair program files. Since the *.PST file in question is a data file, it would not be part of this detect and repair process, though it should!

4. An upgrade often fixes problems with the program, but if it is a problem with the data file (*.PST), the upgrade will have little or most likely no effect.

The questions I would now ask you are:

5. How big is the PST file? Nmenaker is correct that 2-3 GB PST files tend to "puke." It has been my experience however, that this "puking" can also begin at a much earlier stage .. even as low as 150 MB. It was part of my job to try to recover PST file data in a Fortune 100 Company for our users. We could usually recover the data, but this recovery was time intensive and was not always 100% successful. Microsoft states that these PST files can safely get up to the 2 GB level. The problem is that this is a theoretical limit. Depending on how you use the file, alignment of the stars, etc, your "actual limit" may be much lower. We never had a PST file that was not 100% recoverable if it was less than 200 MB. PST files use a JET database. If you have ever been in an office with a bunch of database admins, you would have heard their frequent complaints about database corruption, especially if it was a JET database.

6. Where is the PST file located? If it is local to your PC, then you have fewer sources of corruption and can rule out network traffic as the cause as to why deleting things takes forever. If your PST file is saved "on the network" you have corruption and speed issues to deal with just because you have a network in the way. It was my experience that PST files saved on network drives corrupted more frequently.

7. If the PST file is located on the network, you will need to copy it to your local computer before running scanpst.exe on it, since it won't be repaired properly over the network.

8. If you are using an OST file, this too can corrupt. Use scanpst.exe (2002 or higher version) to scan the OST file, by changing the drop down menu. If it is corrupt, just simply create a new one in your profile and delete the old OST file when you are sure it is safe. This can be done since the use of an OST file indicates that the server is keeping copies for you and is syncronizing the data between your PC and the Exchange server.

9. If the OST file is corrupt, you can export the OST data to a new PST file, just to be realllly safe, in case you click a few places you shouldn't ..

10. Which version of Outlook are you using? Corporate/Workgroup? If you are using Corporate/Workgroup, then you will likely have a OST. But if you are accessing a POP3 or IMAP server, you will only have a PST file.

11. If you are using Corporate/Workgroup, do you have the delivery set to the PST file? You can tell this under the "deliver new mail to the following location" tick box.

From the information you have given me thus far, namely the time to delete being excessively long, I am personally leaning to the PST file as being the culprit .. but answer these short questions for me and we will go from there.

Robert

Gaucho,

I just wanted to add a quick note ... that the reason I am suggesting troubleshooting the PST/OST file(s) first is so that we can rule these out before progressing to the possible network related issues. It is easiest I think to start local ..

Robert

Robert, thanks again for your help.

1) my PST file's actual size I need to check on... but I have some 27,000 emails and some 600 contacts plus some moderate use on the calendar side.... no idea how big the PST files actually are, but I will try to figure this out and let you know.

2) My Outlook is part of a stand alone PC, so Im not running this on a corporate network and my PST files are all on my resident hard drive. My system is an IBM ThinkPad T30 with a 60GB drive and 1MB RAM. Im running XP Professional and had the pre-installed MS Office Professional 2002 package delivered with the system from the IBM factory.

3) As for the version of the Outlook, I dont think its Corporate or Workgroup, since as I state above its part of a stand alone laptop and the Office Suite was purchased as a factory installed option or what I assume was a one user one license version of the Office Suite.

As a final comment.... Ive started a new thread with some Windows XP issues that Ive now detected. I dont know if Im paranoid or what, but now it seems like my entire OS is acting up.... I cant even change the settings of the screen saver without the sistem hanging and showing me the dreaded "not responding" label. Maybe my Outlook issues are related to some bug or corrupted file or function that I have in my OS...?

Please see details of my Windows problems here:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showt...wpost&t=335225

pst file size
 

you can usually find this by doing a search, or you can usually get the data size by right clicking on the INBOX in outlook, then going to PROPERTIES and then clicking the box that says, SHOW FILE SIZES.

That should also give you a pretty good range.

based on your post, I don't think file size is the issue.
If the .pst is corrupted. you can make a new one, copy everything from the corrupted one to the new one, delete the old one and then rename the new one the same as the old one. pretty straight forward.

Sounds like you might have some other issues though.

I found a natsy bug that I could see in my system, services only and it was resident in memeory.

I was only able to get it removed by running a Norton disk (a AV program I don't really recommend) from startup, and then letting it run a memory scan. Kept me out of touch for two days and what a PIA.

Panda also worked well on that one, panda soft. I didn't get anywhere that time with AVG.

Wish you were next door, I love troubleshooting these buggers.

I also used this one
 

You should definitely reduce the size of the PST file. This will improve performance, particularly when deleting and moving emails. Also, it will make the startup of outlook much faster post-crash. My suggestion is to use PST files as your top-level folder organization (just go to file-new-data file). For instance, I use a different pst file for each client engagement.

Also, if you do move to 2003. 2003 features a new (supposedly improved) type of pst file. 2003 works with the older files as well. You can't convert the old pst to the new -- you have to create a new file and then copy all of the contents over in outlook.