Outlook 2007 slow performance

Had client that reported he was seeing very slow performance within his outlook 2007 profile. When he switched folders between Inbox and Sent folders, the top of the email window would show “loading” and pause for a bit before displaying the emails in the folder. Hmmm. well this could arise from a number of things and here is what I did to attempt to fix it:

Per some other blogs and newsgroup items I did the following:
1. Disabled some add-ons that I knew my client would never use
2. Compacted the PST database files – this helped a lot actually with performance.

3. Finally found a link on a news group that had article published by Microsoft that indicated they released a patch in December of 2010 that ended up causing more harm than good – causing performance issues etc. The patch was KB2412171. The link to Microsofts publication of the problem is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/outlook/archive/2010/12/17/issues-with-the-recent-update-for-outlook-2007.aspx

Here’s an excerpt from the article:
On Tuesday, December 14, we released an update (KB2412171) for Microsoft Outlook 2007. We have discovered several issues with the update and want to inform you about problems you might encounter and what corrective steps we recommend. As of December 16, this Outlook 2007 update has been removed from Microsoft Update

2.Noticeable performance issues are experienced when switching between folders if you do not have a Microsoft Exchange Server account configured in Outlook. Switching folders might take several seconds depending on the performance of your computer. This issue only applies when you use an IMAP, POP3, or Outlook Live Connector account, such as Windows Live Hotmail, and do not have an Exchange Server account configured in the same Outlook profile.

The article has a few other items and then explains how to remove the patch from your system.

After doing all of the above, Outlook now performs like a charm.
I still recommended to my client to run routine datafile compacting as it will speed up the overall performance for the user experience.