I have been using OUtlook 2011 with Leopard 10.5.8 for about three months with no issues (I had used Entourage in the past but hated it and just deleted it, preferring to run Windows under a virtual machine when I had to collaborate with my Windows colleagues).
Anyway, I performed the "auto update" software updates from Apple that showed up this week on my MacBook Pro and immediately afterwards I began getting the spinning beach ball with Outlook 2011 to the extent that it is very nearly unusable. 50% of the time it is locked frozen. Then it will unfreeze, I can compose an email, and send. Then it will freeze again and I have to wait two minutes for it to unlock. Some times this happens in the middle of composing the email.
There are no errors posted to the errors log
Watching the "progress" window, I cannot correlate anything shown there with the freezes and lock-ups that occur.
I am running against an Exchange Server as well as my personal Gmail account.
Total size of my Exchange account folder (with subfolders) is 299,658k
Total size of my Gmail account folder (with subfolders) is 1,937 MB which seems like a lot, but it was not causing a problem before the Apple software update.
I have tried changing IMAP settings, with no results