Hotmail Pages Slow to Load
 

Anyone else experienced this annoying problem?........

Sony VIAO Desktop, P4, 2.4Ghz, 80G H.D., Windows XP, IE6, cable fed, behind a router hardware firewall and a software firewall.

Everything was working great until I downloaded a multitude of Critical Updates, Security Updates and Recommended Updates, a Cumulative Patch IE 6, SP 1 & SP 1 (Express) as well as a few other peripheral upgrades.

The e-mail server is MSN Hotmail.

Ever since the downloads, every time an e-mail message in Hotmail is selected, the status bar shows a rapid page load to about 99%, then it freezes the computer for exactly 2 minutes before the page loads and other functions and page selections become available.

This only happens with Hotmail. All else works fine.

Tried adjusting the various 'options' and all the settings I could think of. No Joy! Ran a virus check & it comes up clean. Disconnected & reconnected the firewalls. No change.

I'm stumped.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance for your help.

LastCall

You seem to be pretty secure from the outside world with your firewalls but have you run a spyware checker to see if it is something that is made to run during a login to Hotmail, long shot but worth a try.

Also do you have a lot of mail in your hotmail inbox as I have heard that this can cause similar problems.

Have you tried looking what processes are running hard when you get this problem.

download site here

I have a similar problem, using Win 98 and IE5.5. AND After updating the latest stuff too!
Everytime i click on a new message it freezes and all other links dont work. Give it time and they work after few minutes. (Will time it to see if its the same two minutes!)

Also MSN Messenger has been playing up. After you login the logo spins around as usual to show its logging in. But then it too freezes. After getting on with other stuff, it opens up a few minutes later. When i used to Ctrl-Alt-Del to End the program it would show its Not Responding.

**Unrelated Im sure but the MSN and hotmail is down tonight too..any ideas? Perhaps i should change to Yahoo!

F_S_D

Many thanks for the reply.

I make it a habit of running 'SpyBot S&D' regularly. Ran it again after your suggestion. Nothing unusual came up. An excellent program I might add.

Also, the total number of e-mail messages in my in-box was nothing out of the ordinary.

The hardware firewall is a by-product of the LynkSys router I use because the desktop is on a cable feed that is shared with a Compaq laptop running Win 98SE, IE 5.5. No problems with Hotmail on that system. It's only on Win XP.

The software firewall is part of 'Norton System Works' which I've had on my system for 2 years now. It's a set of programs that I really like and has been problem free for me.

BoeingBus2002

Again, thanks for your reply which got me thinking. I've had problems in the past with upgrades to MSN Messenger and IE6 on my Win 98SE Laptop. On the two occasions that I've upgraded to IE6 and a higher version of MSN Messenger on Win98, I've had problems, and have removed the upgrade and reverted back to IE 5.5 and the previous version of MSN Messenger.

I just went back over the recently downloaded updates and discovered that MSN Messenger 6.0 was one of the programs downloaded.

I went to Control Panel/Add-Remove Programs/ and removed Messenger 6.0. Then I tried Hotmail to see what would happen.

Guess what! Problem solved! No more freeze-ups. Everything is back to normal.

Also, going to the Start Menu, selecting Programs, and I find Windows Messenger. Tried it, and it's working normally.

I surmise that it must be a glitch in the Messenger 6.0 program that is effecting Hotmail page loading on my machine.

Again folks, many thanks for the replies. The suggested fix led me to the answer.

Cheers