It Appears that Outlook Lock's Up My PC

[davesaint]

I've haven't had many problems with Outlook Express since I've purchased my Dell a year ago. Two days I starting experience problems.

Problem-When I double-click on the Outlook Express icon, Outlook Express opens and a dialog box appears with my login in it. I usually just type in my password and click OK and my new messages load just fine. Two days ago when I would type in my password and click on okay my system would freeze. About 5 seconds later the mouse pointer would start moving on the screen by itself. I cannot ctrl-alt-del when this happens. I end up power cycling my PC. Two days ago I was having this problem in the morning. Later in the afternoon things were fine-I could access my email. Last night I ran in to trouble again. I loaded the latest version of IE from Microsoft and then rebooted and tried accessing my email through Outlook Express again. It worked. Today I was able to access my email until about 3pm today. Now every time I try to access Outlook Express, my PC freezes up again. This is frustrating. I hope some of you have some ideas out there that will allow me to resolve this issue. I tried loading Internet Explorer again but the system will not let me since I already have the latest version. Thanks in advance for you suggestions.

 

[doody73]

I can suggest that you try uninstalling both IE and OE and trying installing version 5 and see if that crashes first?


Alternatively, have you tried installing netscape with the messenger email client and downloading your emails that way to see what happens?

 

[beerhunter2]

Have you checked for Viruses?

 

[davesaint]

I did scan for viruses and tried uninstalling back down to IE 5.

I finally figured out what was happening. My PC locked up on me again. I did a Ctrl-Alt-Del which this time opened windows task manager. I clicked on "Applications" and I noticed that two application of Outlook Express were running twice even though only one window was open. Before I purchased High-Speed internet access I was accessing the internet using AT&T Worldnet dial-up service. When I loaded the software that AT&T provided apparently IE/Outlook Express were loaded even though IE/Outlook was resident on my system when I bought it. It appears one Outlook Express application was conflicting with the other.