Could Outlook Connector twins be behind poor Outlook 2007 HTML performance?

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Hello, and advanced apologies for the long post,

I’ve a vexing problem with Outlook 2007. Some of the newsletters to which I subscribe take a hideously long time to render. The problem tends to be most pronounced when I open one from HP in particular…it can be longer than 7 minutes for the e-mail to finish ‘downloading,’ or whatever it’s doing, during which time the CPU activity pegs near or over 99% (as indicated by Sysinternals’ Process Explorer-the culprit of all the activity is shared between Outlook.exe and SearchIndexer.exe). Other e-mail, some of which are also HTML-based, do not take this long to render.

So I started hunting around to see if anyone else has had this problem. Then I found a slew ofthreads that shouted loudly that a bad Outlook update caused a major performance problem. The specific update was referenced by MS KB2412171. I was not sure that this was the culprit behind my own problems, since I don’t remember having trouble about changing folders. I did have a small issue with archiving, which I fixed by deleting a couple of RSS feed folders, then recreating them. And I don’t think I’ve had problems with receiving e-mail from SPA-required accounts. But, just in case I was seeing a minority wrinkle in the performance problem that this update seems to have caused, I uninstalled it.

Well, after uninstalling, I opened Outlook again, then tried opening an HP newsletter again. I think that after 10 minutes, it’s safe to say that this action did not fix my problem. Then I started looking at the other installed updates on my machine, when I was made to blink not once, not twice, not even three times, but more times than I paid attention to count, when I stumbled across an update of the Outlook Social Connector 32-bit being installed twice! After rubbing my eyes to make sure that my spring allergies wasn’t making me see things that were not there, MS KB2289116 actually was listed twice in the installed updates table. I then remembered that I had had trouble with uninstalling the Connector a while back, but I had thought I had fixed that. Should I be worried that having this in there twice is affecting the performance of my admittedly aged and anemic machine?

If I should be, how do I uninstall the Connector to try again? My machine just an ancient P4 1.8GHz CPU with 1 GB RDRAM, but now runs Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit. I also have installed Office Home and Student 2007, and I’ve installed most of the Windows Live 2011 suite, specifically, Live Mail, Writer, Mesh, Messenger, Movie Maker, and Photo Gallery. And, not that it should matter, since Outlook is supposed to run its own browser for displaying HTML e-mail, I’ve IE 9 RTW and FireFox 4.0 browsers installed.

Three other things that I’ve noticed: 1) I see what I call a “busy window” which states “Outlook is contacting the server”, 2) often when #1 happens, my dial-up software tries to connect, even though my machine is attached to a DSL ‘bridge’ via a home router/gateway, and 3) Outlook will suddenly crash and restart itself on a random basis.

Thanks in advance, and again, my apologies for the length of the post,

AE

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Hi AE,

Firstly you mentioned the two processes that do the CPU hike tango are Outlook.exe and SearchIndexer.exe

The latter being the Windows Search service which indexes all sorts of content on your computer these days with the intended outcome of making things easier to find. I would recommend you temporarily disable the service and check if the issue is still present.

Make sure Outlook.exe is closed and then type in services.msc into the Start Menu search box. Once you’re there, you can find Windows Search in the list and click the Stop button.

Now start Outlook and check how things are running. Report back with your findings.

Also in regard to your Outlook Connector issue I would not be entirely concerned with it not uninstalling without issue just yet that can be a tidy up process later.

But do ensure that the Outlook Connector Add-in is not loaded with Outlook, this will remove it from the equation.

Disable/Enable Add-ins in Outlook 2007:

1. In Outlook 2007, go to Tools > Trust Center
2. Click on the Add-ins section
3. You will now see all active, non-active, and disabled add-ins. Click on the add-in you want to enable/disable and then click on the Go button towards the bottom.
4. This will then open up the COM add-ins page. You can then check/uncheck the add-ins you want to enable or disable.

I would recommend you disable it if it is active any any non Microsoft Add-in’s that may be loaded with Outlook as they may also be the culprit we haven’t found yet.

Of course let us know how you go with this step also.

Cheers,
JB.

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