Outlook hangs opening attachments & URLs in E-mail

[ljmorsberger]

Starting in early October, I began having difficulty
opening E-mail attachments and clicking on URLs contained
in E-mails. With attachments, when I click on the
attachment, I get the timer symbol, but a period of 60-
120 seconds goes by before the attachment's application
(e.g., Excel, Word, PDF) opens. Sometimes, the
applicaiton opens but the data from the attachment is not
displayed. With URL's, when I click on the URL in an E-
mail, again, the timer symbol is displayed and 60-120
seconds passes before the page opens in my IE browser
window. With both attachments and URLs, my Outlook
screens go blank (all white) during the delay. These
delays are in contrast to the near-instantaneous response
I enjoyed prior to early October. I am running Windows
XP Home with all updates installed, Office XP 2002 with
all updates installed. I am also running Norton Internet
Security 2003. My Compaq Presario 5320 has 1 GB of RAM,
so it's unlikely memory is a problem. This problem
commenced after a Windows update download in early
October (all updates are installed). My first attempts
to correct the problem currupted my registry and required
a complete system restore before my PC was usable again.
After re-installing all software and Windows XP and
Office updates, the problem returned. A search of the MS
Knowledge Base and newsgroups suggests turning off
Windows IM, which I have done, to no avail. I BELIEVE
THE PROBLEM MIGHT BE ATTRIBUTABLE TO A WINDOWS UPDATE OR
SECURITY PATCH INSTALLED IN EARLY OCTOBER AS THAT WAS THE
SOLE HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE CHANGE PRIOR TO THIS PROBLEM.
Please help--it's tough to conduct business, especially
phone sales meetings, when I'm suffering these delays.

 

[Bill Wilkinson]

I agree! Same thing happened to me

And I recently upgraded to Office2003 with no change in results

The (very hacky) solution seems to be to RIGHT CLICK on the mail with the attachment (never left click on it first!) and then click on "View Attachments" and then "Open" (or Save, as appropriate)

Searching the news groups, I find the first mention of this in mid-September, so you and I probably didn't install the problem update as soons as somebody else did

I have sent the "error report" almost every time it has happened, but I see nothing at all from the Office group mentioning the problem

Incidentally, the problem occurs on only ONE out of FIVE different computers that I use! The one with the problem is the only one upgraded to Office2003, but as I said, it was happening with OfficeXP before that. I was hoping the upgrade would solve the problem

Here's the funniest part: I tried to report the problem, signed in with Passport, entered my product ID and....The ID is invalid! Presumably because they haven't yet entered the Office2003 series of serial numbers into the system! **DOH!*