I am actually losing sleep over this issue. I have a user who I gave a new Dell D620 laptop to about 4 months ago. Per policy she had admin rights on the laptop. We run XP pro, Office Pro 03, Sophos AV with Exchange server for mail on the back end. She was experiencing the following issues:
1.After booting up on the network she would open Outlook and it would give her the message box saying she was offline and would she like to Retry, Cancel or Work offline. She did not have Outlook set tp auto open and was not opening immediately upon the system booting up.
2. The other problem she would have is at random intervals the laptop would slow to a crawl to the point of just typing letters, whether in word, notepad or the run box, would take a second per letter for them to show up. She thought it was Sophos as it was newly installed. I turned off on access scanning and went so far as to uninstall spophos and install AVG with the same issues.
3.he last issue was that from time to time IE7 would not open. It would just hang on opening, even in no add-ons mode.
I did the following things to fix:
1.uninstalled Sophos replaced with AVG
2.Demoted her to Power User
3.uninstalled all user installed apps
4. reinstalled IE7
5.Cleaned out wupdates SoftwareDistribution folder
6.Ran AV on whole computer
7.Ran Hardware diagnostics
Finally…………..I rebuilt the laptop….I went so far as to blow away the partition with linux boot disk and cfdisk and rebuilt XP pro. It is installed, fully updated with no extraneous apps and……………………..The same symptoms are happening. The only things I transferred from old profile to new were office .ops settings, favorites, My Documents and Desktop. I scanned all of these folders with AV before putting them back on.
ANY HELP WOULD BE APPRECIATED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!