Microsoft Breaks Outlook (Again)
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Microsoft’s monthly updates seem to have broken Outlook.
Customers have been reporting Outlook 2003 as running slow and there being a painful wait (lag) when opening and rendering emails. People are starting to report the issue on various forums throughout the Internet, so this is a significant issue!
Current thinking is the problem might be related to the Internet Explorer cumulative update contained in May’s patch cycle. Turning off automatic updates and uninstalling “Cumulative security Update for Internet Explorer 931768″ has so far been successful in our limited testing. Of course, if you’ve yet to do May’s patching and you use Outlook 2003, and possibly prior versions, then you may wish to put off installing the problematic update until Microsoft fix it.
It has been suggested that changing Outlook’s start-up configuration to show Outlook Today also works around the issue, but we’ve yet to test this “fix”. Please leave feedback if this works for you.
Hopefully, Microsoft will fix this ASAP as it is causing all kinds of problems for end customers. Thankfully, Outlook 2007 isn’t affected by this issue since they moved to using the Word rendering engine.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft update, Outlook, patch Tuesday, performance issue
May 11th, 2007 at 6:35 am
This problem is also with Windows mail in Vista.
May 12th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Thanks for sharing even more bits that are breaking.
We were working on a Vista machine today and didn’t notice any issue with Windows Mail 7. Mmmmm! It is a strange one as not every user is being affected. It will be interesting to find out the root cause in due course, although all indications are pointing at the IE update when it is applied on some so far unidentified set-up.
May 13th, 2007 at 12:36 am
We’ve just got word from Microsoft UK that this has been escalated.
Nice to see we’ve also made The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/11/ms_update_glitch/
May 14th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
The “Outlook Today” workaround fixes the issue, at least here.
Also, there is a lot of technical info on this thread, at AumHa: http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=26866&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
May 15th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Noticed this after I switched off using Word 2003 as my default editor. Typing produced apparently blank space until 10 or so seconds later, the characters would appear. Re-booting didn’t help but re-enabling Word as the editor did.
May 16th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Uninstalling patch 931768 hasn’t made any noticeable difference to the performance of OL2003 on my machine.
Using Word as the enable editor seems to make Outlook run faster, despite OUTLOOK.EXE and WINWORD.EXE using more memory than OUTLOOK.EXE on it’s own.
But who in their right mind wants to use Word as the email editor?!
May 16th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
The link posted by Marcello makes for very interesting reading. This seems feasible. Do the people that are having problems use any applications that add to the Restricted Zone e.g. Spybot, Spyware Blaster, etc.
Anyone that upgrades to Office 2007 will be using “Word” as their email editor with the change away from the IE rendering engine to Word. But I do agree that no one will be in a hurry to chose to use Word as their email editor of choice.
May 17th, 2007 at 11:54 am
I’m using both Spybot and SpywareBlaster. It seems obvious, though, that this is really a Microsoft bug, as the suspected causes of the slowdown, according to the AumHa thread, are not actually removed by using the “Outlook Today” workaround.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:36 am
Thanks for the tip about uninstalling IE update 931768. It seems to have sorted out the problem I was having with very sluggish Outlook 2003.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:53 am
Your welcome Frankie.
June 9th, 2007 at 2:06 am
My problem is getting worse by the day. It is now a major annoyance.
June 10th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
The official line so far is “no comment”.
It should hopefully be fixed soon. It takes time for them to make the fix and then do all the testing before it is released.
June 11th, 2007 at 2:28 am
The issue has been re-raised to the Microsoft Security Team. Hopefully, this will result in a thorough review and fix soon.
As already highlighted by Marcello, this post has the best option to workaround the issue:
http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?p=151711&sid=f845855901cec57500a16418b97f0476#151711
Please keep the comments coming as the more problems reported, the more likely the fix will have greater focus.
June 13th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
It appears the problem has been fixed. Can anyone confirm this?
June 14th, 2007 at 12:46 am
One of the June updates (KB933566) supercedes last month’s update (KB931768), you know the one that screwed things up! Perhaps they’ve fixed the issue by chance or it has been fixed and their not letting on. Either way, I know we couldn’t care less if it is fixed now!
Anyone else care to comment?
June 14th, 2007 at 7:26 am
Just tried an older system that has Windows XP Pro + MS Office 2003. When Outlook is configured to compose in HTML format the delay is still there. Turn it to RTF and the typed characters appear immediately. Doesn’t look like it has been fixed in all cases!
June 25th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
KB933566 caused the same slowdown as KB931768 to Outlook 2003 for me. Fix was to uninstall it. Now all ok.
July 14th, 2007 at 2:15 am
Changing to today as the OL2003 start, has just worked for me, I suppose the issue is still there in update, but OL is now usable. Thanks all for your help.
July 14th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Thanks everyone for all the comments.
We’re now setting customers up to use plain text for email composition. This seems to be the best solution as it keeps the important IE updates and allows them to run Outlook at full speed, albeit without all the nice formatting of RTF and HTML emails.
Hope that helps.
July 25th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
For Spybot users, IE 7, Outlook 2003 and Spybot with Plug Ins for Outlook and Browser enabled seem to be the deadly combination here. We’ve found a few work arounds.
For outlook lag changeing the mail format from HTML to both plain and rich text worked for us- not jsut plain text.
This has worked for some people:
In Outlook go to Tools/Options/Security/Security Zones, change from “Restricted Sites” to “Internet”.
MS Outlook help says:
Quote:
Zone list box— Specify the zone you want to apply to HTML messages. Zones can warn you of potential dangers or can prevent scripts and other processes from running when you open HTML messages. To change the settings associated with each zone, click Zone Settings.
If the lag is in IE not Outlook, people are getting round this till Spybot/MS come up with a fix by simply disabling the BHO Plug-in.
Hope this helps some of you. We’re still looking for a real fix. Happy hunting to all!
July 27th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Thanks for sharing this Nancy.
Yes, those fixes should work, but it is a real shame that we have to downgrade / circumvent our protection products to be able to use Outlook 2003 and earlier versions of Outlook.
The other fix is to use Outlook 2007, which uses Word as the rendering engine for emails, but then again you’ve got a whole new set of issues with that product!!!!
We’ve still to hear something/anything from Microsoft other than our contact recognising the problem and raising it on their bug tracking system.
August 6th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Things improves for a bit, now it seems worse then ever! It is taking forever to get things done.