Outlook 2000 - Locking up

this is long shot, but if user has preview pane turned on and first message is corrupt, it will hang. easy to try, run outlook with command line switch to turn off preview pane, e.g. Start/Run
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Outlook.exe" /nopreview
there are lots of things unfortunately that can cause outlook to hang like this. something to do with this users mail box seemingly...maybe other command line switches can help you pinpoint. for example: /safe
they are detailed in mskb article 197180, from support.microsoft.com
i searched there for "stop responding" and got many interesting hits...good luck

this is long shot, but if user has preview pane turned on and first message is corrupt, it will hang. easy to try, run outlook with command line switch to turn off preview pane, e.g. Start/Run
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Outlook.exe" /nopreview
there are lots of things unfortunately that can cause outlook to hang like this. something to do with this users mail box seemingly...maybe other command line switches can help you pinpoint. for example: /safe
they are detailed in mskb article 197180, from support.microsoft.com
i searched there for Outlook 2000 with "stop responding" and got many interesting hits...good luck

1st of all how are those 50 MBs broken down?If most or all of them are in his main inbox & not a pst file or multiple pst files &/or all of these are stored on the email server & not in a shared pst file it needs to load all the messages into memory1st.If you use viral protection software on the server and on the local machine this will greatly slow things down as it must scan twice each message before allowing the user control of his mailbox.Does this user also access his email through outlook express on another computer which is extremely finicky and has limits to how many emails can be in one folder and how large it can get without getting corrupt?If this user has like 14000 emails all within his main inbox/sentfolder and/deleted box to which he is not willing to part with; they need to create a seperate pst file, make a folder called deleted/inbox/sent, etc and copy them out to clear things up and save load resources.
What if any is the max mailbox size set for this user on your server? is he at/over the limit.
You may wish to try the following things, create a bogus email user on the server. see if this user can open from one computer your problem users .pst file. If he can copy & save it as something else. Set permissions for this second user to be able to access the problem users mailbox, syphon out the mail messages to a pst file & clear up the problem users mailbox. Have the problem user at this time delete his roaming profile &recreate it, linking to the new pst file created & his clean mailbox.
I do not think it is truelly not responding, it is just going to take an astronomical length of time that your user is unwilling to wait. The more times you ConAltDel this the more likely you have already corrupted his profile &/or pst files that may have been open.
continued in 2nd message cause of length restriction

continued from previous response

Do you have alternate access to email , & if so does this user have the same problem accessing his account this way. The user may wish to create a profile that is just his mailbox & has no attached .pst files first, if this works fine, it is a corrupt .pst that is most likely hanging you each time, or that in conjunction to needing to archive/ export messages to a pst.
A variety of temp files are loaded in his roaming profile that are removed when outlook closes correctly, these may not have been removed, and may need to be deleted prior to him reopening his mailbox.