I had a customer that said Outlook express would always lockup the PC.

I had a quick look, but couldn’t see a problem.

The PC was running XP, CPU was a core2 duo, and there was plenty of RAM (1GB).

I went through my usual tuning routine, as the PC seemed a bit slow.

While waiting for a defrag to complete, I looked at the outlook express files… ie:

C:Documents and Settings[UserName]Local SettingsApplication DataIdentities{LONG HEX NUMBER}MicrosoftOutlook Express

I found it odd that the “Deleted Items.dbx” file was huge (about 900Mb).

Something was wrong here.

I stopped the defrag (I’d have to restart it once I sorted out OE).

A quick look at Outlook express showed about 80 emails in the deleted items folder, and none that would explain why the dbx file was so large.

I suspect that a huge email was “deleted” at some point in the past, and that OE will occasionally take a long time (ie appear to be locked up) while managing the deleted items folder.

So, the obvious next step was to file -> folder -> compact all folders

After about 15 minutes, the process had completed, and the deleted items.dbx file was a much more manageable size of 140Kb

After that (3 weeks later), the customer reported that the email hasn’t lock up since.