Windows

You gave a lot of information but some data is missing. Assuming you are on some kind of network, Outlook will look update schedules, check for mail, and perform all kinds of tasks in the background, with little or no screen reflection of what is going on. Outlook is very powerful and has a lot of features. I would suggest you open Outlook, and under the options, check to see what your settings are. How often to check for mail, how often to update calendars, etc. Maybe even turn a lot of the features off. Does the problem happen if you use Outlook Express. Hopefully you did not delete Outlook Express. It's used by Windows in ways I don't have room to explain here. Hope this helps.

Humm... you're right! That is a tough one! :)

Here's a stab at it...

In your device manager, check to see if the Network Card is using the same IRQ as one of the display adapters. If they share the same IRQ, your display will be slow as you mentioned when Outlook is communicating on the network via the Network adapter. This could be a possibility as Win98 and the newer systems will allow IRQ sharing.

If the first stab didn't help, try removing one of the video card and see if it makes a difference.

Let us know. I'm curious as to what was the causes as well...

Good luck.

In my humble opinion it sounds like your system is fighting for available resources. You may want to look at the temp folder under the windows directory to see how full it may be and perhaps clean it out. You may also want to take a look to see howmuch free space your hard drive has left. To me it sounds like you may be a bit tight on available space for the swap file. When you have nothing better to do you may want to run some diagnostics on the hard drive to make sure it's still healthy.

This may sound a little crude, but some of the most recent viruses going around run in the background when Outlook is running. If you have already obtained the latest anti-virus updates then this is probably not your problem. If not, I recommend that be your next step. The sooner the better. Some of the viruses are very damaging.

Hope this helps.

I am going to be blunt. 1st try timing another system with a similar configuration and see how much slower yours is, I bet it isnt that much slower. If you still wanna fix this,I recommend a full format/reinstal of windows. I know it isnt the answeryou wanted but I garantee it will solve the problem if it's SW.