Here's the deal: All day... no.. scratch that.. for the last 18 hours straight I've been fielding calls from clients (and I'm sure I'll be doing this for the rest of the week) that are having issues with either Outlook 2003 or 2007, where for some unknown reason both were running really, really slow, and in all cases these clients were running XP (Home/Pro, doesn't matter), and had IE7. Any new email they created, opened, forwarded, or what not would be slow to open, and any text they typed was slow to appear. It took me a couple hours to figure this cap out, but lo and behold, Microsoft was to blame... again:
Outlook 2003 and 2007 both use IE's Internet Zones as part of it's security, and both scan any email you get, or any email you type up for Internet links within IEs Trusted/Restricted Sites list. Also, both use HTML for creating and displaying those email by default. Now, normally this process is really fast, however if you use a program, such as Spybot Search & Destroy, or SpywareBlaster to add restricted sites to that list Outlook can take much longer to compare links, because now the list will have gone from a couple hundred to a dozen thousand sites for it to check, however, it should be only a pause of a few seconds initially. Or rather it was until Microsoft pooched things.
May 8th saw the release of the "Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP (KB931768)" to fix a number of issues (of which you can read by following the link
HERE). Suffice it to say this.. um.. "fix", for some stupid reason, has Outlook checking the restricted/trusted list for every single letter you type up. It now it will take 10 seconds to open or create an email initially, and 3-10 seconds for any letters you type to show up. Fast typist? Sorry.. but your screwed. Go get something to eat, cuz you will be waiting a while for your words to catch up.
The fixes for the fix? There are 3 simple ways to fix this: 1) switch to creating email, and receiving email in rich text only, 2) remove all restricted/trusted listings in your Internet Security section of IE7 (yeah, like that's going to happen), or 3) go to Add/Remove Programs, check the box that says "Show Updates", scroll down to the listing that says "Windows Internet Explorer 7 - Software Updates", remove the bastich that says "KB931768", and reboot. Then.. don't f'ing download it again (or f'ing call me about it!).. <Ahem> Sorry about that.. just a little.. testy.
Anyways, I still have some testing to do as I don't know if this issue shows up if you use IE6, or previous versions of Outlook, so I'll let you guys know when I know, you know?
And sorry for length of this post, but.. um.. it made for a better story this way.
