Entourage Freezes

[Edwin the Elder]

I am experiencing problems with Entourage 2004. It worked fine until about 3 weeks ago. Now it freezes in Mail. The beach ball appears when I view a message - especially if I try to delete it - and I have to Force Quit. I have tried removing the Preview Pane - but it does not help. I cannot find reference to this problem on the Entourage support site.

I am using the latest updated Panther on an iMac G5.

Suggestions?

 

[CanadaRAM]

1st: find your Entoutage identity - probably in your User: documents: Microsoft User Data. Look atthe size of the Mail Database; make sure you have at least that much free drive space on that volume. Optionally, back up your User Data folder to CD before proceeding

Set Energy Saver to Never Sleep. Plug the machine in if it is a portable. Quit all other programs

Hold down the option key and open Entourage, it will ask you if you want to rebuild your database. Say Yes, choose Complex Rebuild. DO NOT TOUCH THE MACHINE Go away and have dinner, watch a movie, whatever. Come back several hours later, see if it reports that it has finished. IF the machine looks hung, don't touch it, go and watch another movie.

When it is finished, you will have a new message database, and your old one will be saved as Old....

This may do the trick. Now delete any obviosly unwanted and spam messages, and remove Attachments from mail messages where you have save the attachments already to your hard drive.

 

[Edwin the Elder]

Thanks

I'll try your advice.

In the meantime I have turned off "message notification" and "Display Complex HTML messages."

This seems to have solved work.

But of course I can't get HTML, which is not great.

Thanks.

I suspect I'll just retrun to using Mac Mail.

 

[Edwin the Elder]

CanadaRam

Tried your advice - but it did not work out quite like I hoped.

On opening with the option key held down, I get to check a list of checking database integrity, compacting database or rebuilding it

there is also an options choice - but it's merely for whether to check integrity in the background.

I chose "rebuild database" - and there was no Complex Rebuild option. It only took about 30 seconds to rebuild.

When I relaunched Entourage, it worked for a bit then I got the same freezing problem - which I could only address by turning off HTML.

Now I know why I bought a Mac in the first place - to leave MicroSoft.