Question : Exchange Outlook Clients Keep Pausing on "Outlook is retrieving Data"

Hi,

Hope someone can help with this.

We have five PCs on a small network with a server running Windows SBS 2003 with Windows Server 2003 SP1.  In the last week or two the users have all been finding that new & unread emails take 10 seconds or so to open - until then, Outlook hangs.  After this they can view the email without a problem.  Whilst it is waiting for the unread email to open, the Outlook icon in the system tray turns into an exclamation mark and a popup appears saying "Outlook is retrieving Data from Exchange Server servername.domainname.local".  This popup also regularly appears when Outlook is running but not being used.  These PCs do not use Cached Mode.

On a laptop with Cached Mode enabled emails open straight away and the 'Outlook is retrieving Data" message appears when the email is being downloaded - this makes sense given the way Cached Mode works and I suspect is indicative of the same problem.

I tried enabling cached mode on one PC but it took several minutes to cache less than 6mb of emails and the calendar - this makes waiting for the whole mailbox (4GB in size) unrealistic as it would take hours and this is clearly not a proper solution as the problem remains.  The Inbox on this mailbox is incidentally almost empty, the emails are stored in various other folders by the user.

I have run Performance Monitor and Exmon on the server and can't identify any unusual performance or resource usage spikes - the CPU usage of the information store rose to 50% while the PC was trying to cache its mailbox before I cancelled it but I'd assume this is normal unless someone can tell me otherwise.

The PC I tested Cached Mode on did have Google Desktop installed - I removed this and it seemed to help for a while but the problem returned so I suspect this was a red herring.

The problem did stop for a while of its own accord but after the server was rebooted for another reason altogether the problem returned.  Previous reboots have had no effect.

I've seen that because the error contains the FQDN of the server this suggests a problem in Active Directory but can't see how this could be tested or fixed.  I've pretty much run out of ideas so hope someone here can help.

Regards,

Phil

Answer : Exchange Outlook Clients Keep Pausing on "Outlook is retrieving Data"

Hi,

Thanks for your input.  The problem has mysteriously vanished since I posted this question which means tracing the fault is both difficult and now somewhat pointless.

Thanks to both of you for your help, question closed.

Phil