Sick and tired of Outlook not closing properly?

Sick and tired of Outlook not closing properly?

Don’t have 15 mins to spare every morning having your PC crippled whilst it performs a consistency check?

Feel betrayed by the OCS hotfix that failed to remedy the frustration?

Refuse to negotiate with terrorists?

DON’T SHUT DOWN OUTLOOK WHEN YOU’RE GETTING READY TO SHUT DOWN YOUR MACHINE.

Why? Because when you shut down Outlook, the window goes away, but the process continues running for some time doing file system work on your PST files. That’s why you’ll see OUTLOOK.EXE sitting there in the Task Manager for some time after closing the window. However, when you tell Windows to Shut Down, it tell each OPEN WINDOW to shut itself down, and waits for all OPEN WINDOWS to close before it starts killing off processes. So, if Outlook is an open window, Windows will wait for it to close itself properly before shutting down. But if you the user have already killed the Outlook window, and all that remains is the OUTLOOK.EXE process, then if windows closes all of the other open windows (if any) before OUTLOOK.EXE is done doing its file stuff, windows will kill the OUTLOOK.EXE process (along with every other running process) as it shuts down.

Thus, windows itself will stop Outlook from properly shutting down if Outlook does not have an open window (i.e. visible UI on the screen) when you shut down your operating system. The “fix” for this behavior is to either:

1) Close Outlook a long time before you shut down your PC (or open task manager and make sure OUTLOOK.EXE is not there before shutting down).

or

2) Leave Outlook open when you perform your Start – Shutdown procedure, and let Windows worry about closing it.