I use an Dell with XP Pro home computer with Office/outlook 2003.

Everytime we download mail, we get an icon that appears in the system
tray/toolbar by the clock.  The icon is animated.  Mousing over the
icon it says:

"Microsoft Office Outlook is synchronizing folders"

This synchronizing causes the PC to hang.  

Please can you tell me how to stop the synchronizing of folders.  We
are running Outlook with just POP3s.  Not an exchange server.  If you
are willing to take the time to answer, please could you try the
procedure out on a PC that is running Outlook 2003 and just accesing
POP3 accounts, but not on an exchange server?  A lot of the aswers we
have seen are from people using Exchange servers.  We are totally
stuck on this one.  Please... help...

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Request for Question Clarification by landog-ga on 14 Aug 2005 07:10 PDT

Hi
You can try the following:

"When the size of your offline files (.ost) or personal folders (.pst)
files approaches 2 gigabytes (GB), you may not be able to add more
data to the .pst file or the .ost file.

If you try to synchronize an .ost file from a mailbox that is larger
than 2 GB, the .ost file stops accepting data, and you may receive the
following error message:
Errors in background synchronization. In most cases, more information
is available in a synchronization log in the Deleted Items folder."

See if you can find such a log. Open the log with notepad and see if
it has any interesting details.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=288283


How to compact PST and OST files to eliminate deleted item space in
Outlook 2002 and Outlook 2003:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289987/

Let me know if that does the trick.
Landog-ga

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Clarification of Question by dougkon-ga on 16 Aug 2005 13:43 PDT

Thank you for the reply. 

I went to the link and compacted the .pst files but I believe it had
no effect as they were probably already compacted automatically.

I do not know where or how to find "log files" to check on teh 2mB
capacity.  Do you?

Regards,
Doug

I have a Dell laptop running XP and Office 2003 as well.  I just
installed Office SP2 tonight and immediately started getting the same
behavior.  Did you have any luck in finding a solution?

Running Xp w Outlook 2003 & get this constantly!  Hope you get more
answers on this- mine hangs up & I can't do anything!  I have a lot of
folders & my gut instinct (non-techie here) is that Outlook doesn't
like me having that many folders....

If your .PST and .OST files are under 2gig (BTW my experience is
anything over 500 mb and you are getting risky with the integrity of
your data. Outlook uses these files as really simple/ read - not fault
tolerant databases.) The most likely problem is a feature of outlook
called "Use cached exchange mode". This check box IT folks tend to
like to have you check(reduces load on server by placing it on client)
but it also tends to cause people problems in the long run after
continued use.
Go to Control Panel->Mail setup->Email-Accounts->Next->Change and
uncheck box there. If that doesn't work you may want to go find your
outlook offline files (typically named outlook.ost try search *.ost)
and while outside of outlook rename to outlook.old and restart
outlook. This should create you a brand new offline file which oftens
fixes the problem as well.

NOTE: You may need to update your offline settings after unchecking
this box to make sure any address books or other synched items
continue to synch as this check box overrides offline settings.

-Translocator

I have deleted all my saved e-mail, including that which had been
archived, yet continue to have this same problem. I am not on a
network, so the solutions suggested are not appropriate. Can anyone
help? Surely I am not alone with this issue which, when the computer
hangs, seriously interferes with my work.