Outlook hanging can generally be attributed to several things.
The most common of these is the personal folder or PST, if you have a personal folder can Outlook actually see it?
If you use a network is the network drive available?
If not Outlook will eventually load but only after it times out, if Outlook can see the personal folder make sure it’s not corrupt.
To do this remove it from the Outlook profile from Mail in control panels, make a note of the location, as a default Outlook stores them in a long winded location similar to C: Documents and Settings user Local Settings Application Data Microsoft Outlook personal folder.pst
Now launch Outlook and see if it loads
If it does this means you might have a corrupt personal folder, luckily though Outlook comes with a utility to fix a corrupt personal folder, called scanpst.exe, it can be found within the Microsoft Office directory.
Once you’ve recovered your corrupt personal folder make sure you split it into smaller files.
What’s the maximum size of a PST file? The larger they are the slower things become, but also the more unstable the file will be, there is an absolute file limit of 20gb for one of the newer UNICODE format files, but only 2gb for the older ANSI format, but realistically the larger the PST file the slow it will load, going above 10gb can cause issues.
Simply create more PST files, this will help to speed things up and aid reliability.
This won’t help though if your Personal folder is already damaged, but running the scanpst utility might be able to help here.
Large emails
Receiving large emails can also give the same symptoms of Outlook hanging , if you have a slow connection and a large email is being downloaded be patient, it will get there eventually.
Finally Outlook can hang if it cannot connect to the mail server, this is the same for POP3 or Exchange, and so check to make sure the exchange or the pop3 server is available, even if it’s not it will timeout after a period.
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computer adviser corrupt personal folder article