• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

outlook express makes hdd go bananas!

V

vanderStoep

Senior member
Using MS outlook express 5.50 on a win 98 system.

Sometimes when I use outlook express,usually when I`m looking into some messages, I get an enormous amount of hard disk activity. why? I have no idea. But it is highly irritating, and stalls email that I am sending. I have left it doing what ever it was doing for several minutes, however it did not stop afther waiting several minutes. The only remedy is shutting down outlook expres and restart it again.
It started doing this after I had (permantently) deleted some old emails last week.
How can I stop this activity?

Thanks,




PS. I`m also using the latest norton anti virus and zonealarm, so I do not expect troubles overthere.
 
Hi,

I suppose it's possible that, if your message base was truly huge, this could be the ongoing effect of the background message compacting function trying to recover all of the wasted space from the deleted messages. If you go to the Tools | Options dialog and select the Maintenance tab, is the checkbox for "Compact messages in the background" checked? Try unchecking it, and okaying your way out of the dialog. You should probably perform a manual message base compaction (File | Folders | Compact All) just to let it get it out of its system.

It's also suggestive of other, less benign possibilities. Are you always connected? Anti-virus or no, there's always a possibility of a Trojan using your system. Also, there's the possibility that your anti-virus software is using an email plug-in that's causing this thrashing. I've seen several instances of this behavior by at least four different anti-virus programs (latest versions). In one case the behavior caused a DrWtsn32 dump every time Outlook Express was quit on a W2K Pro system. When I disabled the anti-virus plug-in for Outlook Express, the behavior ceased.

Hope you find a solution.

Regards,
Jim
 
Thanks Jim for your long reply.


As far as Norton av goes, I have instructed it not to interfere with my emails and not to scan them. And I do not load auto proteced at start up so I`m quite sure that it is inactive. I also doubt that it is a trojan, as it started after deleting some old messages and because my firewall is always up, and I only recieve mail from just a few friends with outlook, besides this windows install is only a month old, so chances are few. And my connection is open say about 6 hours day



My message base is not truely huge; i`ve got some 100 emails in my inbox, with in total not more than 40 mb of attachments and some 50 emails in my outbox, almost all without the attachments.I`m going to try "the Maintenance tab" which, is indeed checked, now.
Thanks,
 
Hi, vanderStoep.

Good. Sounds like you have system protection in hand and that a virus/Trojan problem is unlikely. I hope that changing the "Compact messages in background" setting will solve the problem. I noticed that setting was a real performance killer on some Win9X machines, but its effect is hardly noticeable under NT4 and W2K. Hope you'll keep us informed of what's happening.

Regards,
Jim
 

Ah yes, this ""Compact messages in the background" checked? Try unchecking it, and okaying your way out of the dialog" works, the silence is very satisfying

thanks Jim
 
I download mass ammounts of stuff from newsgroups using OE and always have this problem. One way to fix it is to delete and compact news messages manually. right-click the newsgroup and go to properties. The options for removing/compacting are there.

Of course this will only help if you use it as a news reader 🙂
 
Hi, vanderStoep. Glad it worked for you. I do recommend, as others have in this thread, that you compact the message folders manually (File | Folder | Compact All Folders) at least once every few days. It only takes a few seconds to run.

Regards,
Jim
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top