I’ve just reinstalled my operating system (Windows 2000 Pro) and all my apps, and Outlook is doing something strange that it never did before.
When I launch Outlook after a reboot, it continues to retreive messages from the mail server even after I close the program. It’s like it is a TSR (terminate, stay resident). It didn’t do that before, and I can’t figure out how to make it stop. I’ve searched the Web and Microsoft’s knowledge base, and found no hint of this issue.
Before someone suggests this, it has nothing to do with the place where you can set how frequently it retrieves messages. I’ve always had that set to 5 or 10 minutes. But when I closed the program, it stopped.
The reason this is a problem is that I keep the computer on all the time (I have a cable modem connection), and the arrival sound, which I like having during the day, wakes me up at night.
I’ve been muting the sound before I go to bed, but I’d just like it to go back to the way it was before.
Come on folks. Someone must know something about this. Don’t make me pay Microsoft $35 to find out it’s just a checkbox down some deep dark mislabelled menu path.
I had something similar the other day.
It seems you can open more than one instance of Outlook, and it wont display the duplicated in the taskbar, or the ALT-Tab menu.
Try pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to get your task manager menu up, click on the Processes tab, and see if you still have “OUTLOOK.EXE” running even after you’ve closed the program. If so, end the process.
(you might want to run a backup on Outlook first, just in case. ending the process did no damage to my 'puter or outlook, but ya never know!)
I’m not (intentionally) opening more than one instance of Outlook but, as you suggest, after shutting the program down, a process remains in the task manager. I hadn’t looked before, but this had to be the case for it to continue to download messages.
If I follow your advice and kill the process, it will, of course, no longer retrieve messages.
So the question is, why is the outlook.exe process hanging around after I exit the program, and how can I kill it when I kill the program?
I remain confident that some Doper knows the answer to this. Thanks.
I’m not (intentionally) opening more than one instance of Outlook but, as you suggest, after shutting the program down, a process remains in the task manager. I hadn’t looked before, but this had to be the case for it to continue to download messages.
If I follow your advice and kill the process, it will, of course, no longer retrieve messages.
So the question is, why is the outlook.exe process hanging around after I exit the program and how do I stop it?
I remain confident that some Doper knows the answer to this. Thanks.
Well, I fixed it myself, no thanks to all of you so-called experts and smart people! Actually, I suppose Tir Tinuviel deserves a little bit of credit for using some terms that helped me find the answer in the MS Knowledge Base.
If you’re curious about what the cause of the problem was, and how I fixed it, just send me $30 ($5 less than MS charges) and I’ll tell you!
Nah, it was WinFax Pro. Some glitch there. You had to update from 9.02 to 9.03 with a patch on the Symantec Web site.
Thanks for your concern. I’ll try not to let this sad event dishearten me too much. I had thought that the SDMB could provide the answers to any conceivable question. It’s a blow when one’s ideals are shattered this way, but I’ll carry on, a little more cynical, and little colder. But wiser in the ways of the world. (Sob.)
Um… Outlook only downloads email when you’ve actually got the program running. So if you shut it down, then, no, it won’t download email. You’d need to load it again to do that.
The idea is that if you shut down a program it stops doing what it does when you run it.
Now that you’re working again, close Outlook and go check your processes list. OUTLOOK.exe isn’t there is it.
When you close a program it should stop the process. (There are exceptions, Outlook isn’t one of them)
In my case, for some reason when I shut down Outlook, it didn’t stop the proccess. So it didn’t actually close the program, it just looked like it had. But it had shut enough of it down for Windows not to prevent me loading a duplicate.
So in effect I was running 1.99 instances of Outlook.
Using the Task Manager to terminate the extra process was the only way to shut down the .99, as I had no longer had the front end for it.
Ok… well, um, maybe we need to get new hamsters, their ability to psychically alert experts everytime a topic is posted on their specialist subject is obviously faulty. I dunno maybe the Keepers Of the Knowledge You Seek have to eat, or sleep, or work, or godforbid, be away from the computer! :eek:
Your thread got missed, it happens. Might I suggest if it’s that terribly crushing for you that next time try posting your life-threatening crisies on a dedicated computer forum?
Don’t be too disheartened. You proabably just posted at a bad time, and it can sometimes take a while for thread like this to get answered. Next time try a title like “Outlook behaving funny, with bonus titties and free beer (TMI)”
Right, well that’s what it was supposed to do, but as I said in the OP, even though I closed it, and it disappeared from the screen and the task bar at the bottom of the screen, it was still there in the Task Manager, still retreiving messages (and going “ding” in the middle of the night).
We now know that Outlook is one of them when you have WinFax 9.02 running. (WinFax connects to Outlook to share address books and messages.) Updating to 9.03 fixes the glitch.
