The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

Oscar — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 01:18:38 GMT

Better than a Dan Brown's Best Seller: Sysinternals and Exchange ROCKS!!!

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

XMLFREAK — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 07:50:29 GMT

Again Mark, you show the way to go with sysinternal tools. Thanks for making such great debugging en troubleshooting tools. On top of that thank you very much for explaining in detail how to use all these tools together. Greetings from Holland

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

BillP — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 06:08:16 GMT

I found the trouble-shooting discussion useful, but the end result even more interesting. Reducing the "item count" in some user's folders fully solved the issue. Outlook Express, still used by untold millions, has similar odd issues when the number of items in the various folders (INBOX, SENT, DRAFT, TRASH, etc.) exceeds "a limit". In every case I've looked at, when any given folder exceeded 1 Gb. in size, Outlook Express had a variety of issues - not being able to compact folders being the most usual. In every case, deleting messages or moving them to newer folders and reducing the file size (say below 500 Mb.) solved the problem(s).

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

jader3rd — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 18:14:36 GMT

While I do like the debugging that went into finding out why the Exchange server wasn't being as responsive as it should have been, I don't like how the issue is concidered solved. The real issue is "Why does Outlook hang when the server is being unresponsive?" Outlook is supposed to be a smart/fat client. Yet, the Outlook team has passed along most (if not all) of their performance issues onto the server. Having the UI on the client be dependent on the server is ridiculous. The Exchange team writes a more performant server and the Outlook team takes that as a free pass on not creating a more performant design of their product.

I expect the client to be perfectly responsive regardless of the performance of my connection to the server.

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

Acemutha — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 06:13:28 GMT

It's always very nice to read your articles so much to learn from

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

WinSE-4VR — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 13:21:37 GMT

We've had this before...

Back in 1999, on the old WinSE NT4SP6 team, we had this exact same thing happen but on Outlook. A buggy version of the standard AV package would occasionally exec-lock the mailbox pst, and Outlook would think it was corrupted and prompt the user with an ambiguous message to 'fix' it. The exec lock would prevent a fix, so the pst would be flattened to 32k or whatever the default brand-new empty size was, with the usual catastrophic results. The AV patch had been pushed to the 2 main distro servers 6 months prior, but not to the team's semi-private local-server-of-convenience...

Much lolz to see this again 11 years later and the scourge of 3rd party exec locks persists...

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

Parkarab — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:29:06 GMT

Very funny that I just read this after resolving an issue with several Outlook users here in my company. Again, Symantec corporate client was the culprit.

Seems users were upgraded to Symantec endpoint protection. Unfortunately, the Outlook add-in from corporate client v 10.1 was not removed. It kept causing unusual freezing of Outlook.

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

Mike Foley — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:41:47 GMT

Great article.. It reminded me of many late nights chasing locks on OpenVMS. We had a live tool that would allow us to get right into the guts of a hung system and poke around, looking for resource wait conditions. Once you found that, it was a simple (relatively) matter of tracking back to find the process that was stuck and dump its memory to see what was broken.

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

AndrewRichards — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:02:33 GMT

Puneet Banga - As with any use of dbghelp.dll (e.g. in xperf, in procexp, in procmon, in WinDbg, etc.), the extent to which you can see a stack is dependant on the symbols available. Most of Windows symbols are available publically, but only a limited amount is published for other Microsoft applications.

To use the public web symbols with Xperf, use this cmd file:-

md C:\Symbols_Public

md C:\SymCache_Public

set _NT_SYMBOL_PATH=SRV*C:\Symbols_Public*msdl.microsoft.com/.../symbols

set _NT_SYMCACHE_PATH=C:\SymCache_Public

xperf.exe %1

re: The Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs

Hmmm — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:20:14 GMT

You said this was a "really interesting case"...