Question : Outlook cannot open Archive.pst The file is in use by another person or mail enabled application

I have aked our network techs, exchange techs, and server techs about this problem no one has an answer. They all tell me everything is working fine.
We use Microsoft XP Pro, (some computers with XP SP1 and some with XP-SP2 ) Outlook XP with a PST stored on a network drive that is backed-up nightly by the server. Oh and we use Exchange 5.5
All of a sudden last week I got a call from 3 users (on the first day and then 14 users the second day and then 4 the following day {there are 200 users in our organization} telling me there outlook was very slow to open or would hang, or would open fine but when they tried to access there PST file to move messages or even to view would come up and say that archive.pst is in use by another person or mail enabled application, please close all mail enabled applications and restart outlook. Now if you close outlook and open it again you would be able to access your archive normaly for about 15 minutes then all of a sudden this problem would come back. You would click on a folder in your archive and it would sit there with the hour glass, or it would come up displaying the error message again.
Now the users having the problem are on diffrent switches, have lots of disk quota, and the message store on exchange has plenty of space, and in outlook have the messenger service option turned OFF.

Hope you can help !

Answer : Outlook cannot open Archive.pst The file is in use by another person or mail enabled application

AD would have no impact in this issue.
There would no difference if this was just an issue with a machine in a work group. The core problem is bandwidth. A LAN or WAN doesn't have the bandwidth to cope with a pst file.

You might have better success if you shrink the pst file down in size, but it will still be unsupported.

If you need to keep extensive amounts email messages for legal reasons then you may want to look at one of the archiving products instead of using pst files.

Simon.