I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

I'm using win98se, and last night I got the Antinny G virus
http://securityresponse.symantec.com...antinny.g.html
and after successfully removing it Outlook Express seems to be broken - it takes around 2 minutes to load.

Firstly I can rule out the virus being still present - when I loaded Outlook I looked at my firewall and Dumeter and there was no dodgy communications of any sort.

I thought Outlook might have been broken somehow, so I uninstalled it (version 6), which left me with my previous version 5. I then deleted the entire outlook folder then ran reg-clean to clear out any of its registry entries, then reinstalled it and it does the same thing :(

It still takes 2 minutes to load. Once it's loaded it works (almost) fine. I say almost because when I go into options and click around the various tabs looking for stuff it sometimes freezes for a minute.

I did some more googling and then thought maybe it was MSN, so I went here - http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/989/ and made the amendment to the registry and removed MSN's claws from Outlook, but it's still the same.

I reinstalled Outlook so it can't be outlook that's at fault. It must be some other windows component which Outlook seems to want to use, but which obviously isn't inportant to it's functioning as after the 2 min wait it works relatively normal.

Does anyone have any clue what's gping on and how can I fix it.

I found this page http://www.tweakxp.com/display.aspx?id=108 which although is for xp may be relevant. It mentions something about registering with "DCOM". Just as I discovered I had the virus my firewall reported that DCOM had been changed so maybe that's it.

And just as I was about to post this I went into help and looked up DCOM. In one of the help pages it said "Click here to open the Distributed COM Configuration Properties dialog box."
When I click it does nothing!
Could my DCOM be broken, and that's what's causing it. if so how do I get a new DCOM (I don't even know what DCOM is).

EDIT: I downloaded and installed DCOM from here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en hoping it would work but it hasn't fixed it. ARGH!

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

try 'windows update' off the 'start' button?

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

Erm, I tried that already. I found another page that said Dcom is useless so it can't be that either. When I load outlook theres a bit of disc activity. 15 sec later the splash screen appears and then it pauses for over a min before finally loading. I wonder if there's a way to get a log of exactly whats happening to see what outlook is trying to do during that time.

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

How many old emails do you have?Sometimes it pays to get rid of or archive them.

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

Is there a way to somehow record/scan what's actually happening while outlook is loading. During those 2 minutes when it freezes it's obvisouly trying to do something, maybe communicate with some windows component that's got damaged maybe?

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

Is it loading or is email trying to download?

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

No, it does the same even when I'm offline.

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

I've had trouble that was very similar with OE and using ME.I'm trying to remember what I did.

I think I did a 'repair' option on OE and cleaned out all my old mail.

I'm wondering if in the kerfuffle of removing this virus you may have removed a vital component.However I've no real idea beyond reinstalling everything.

Did you clear out everything the virus may be lurking in?What AV do you have?Have you tried checking in safe mode?

I reckon my mate Paul may be your best bet.He has a lot more patience than most and loves a puzzle. :)

Incog. :)

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

I ran "panda quick remover" in safe mode, then did an online scan at that housecall site. Then I rebooted and did another scan just to make sure it was gone, and it was. I don't think the virus is there any more.

What the virus did is add itself to every exe file, so every exe file was around 174k larger. The virus scan made all the files back to how they were before the virus struck.

I completely reinstaller Outlook and that didn't help, so thats's why I thought it must have been some other component that outlook was trying to access. I went to uninstall, selected Internet Explorer but chose the repair option. This made no difference either.

I'm now using Mozilla Thunderbird for my email. It was such a breeze to import the emails, and I've now uninstalled Outlook. It's a tad annoying knowing the problem is potentially still there and may rear its ugly head, but everything seems to be working now. (Just as I'd finished confuguring Thunderbird and sent my first email my cable went down. Grrr, I was already angry through all the virus business, this just topped it off. At least I got an early night for once!)

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

Well I'm pleased to hear you are sorted.Bit worrying though not to know what caused this to happen. :erm:

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

There was a solution to very slow OE start on annoyances.org.........wasn't it you, Incog who found that fix?

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

apologies to the mods in advance, i have found a good site for xp problems is tweakxp.com , is that considered spamming :disturbd:

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

Someone else on another forum said "The 2 minutes to open OE sounds familiar. Something to do with it's protected store being corrupted, there should be an MS Knowledge base article on it." I've never heard of a protected store, but it might jog someone elses memory?

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

I had a problem twice with OE not opening up for ages.However I think it just took a repair on one occasion and for the life of me I can't remember the other one's solution.I suspect Paul may have helped out on that one.As usual with my crap memory I can't remember what the thread was called. :(

Thinking about it I think that thread was somewhere on the now defunct nthellworld.com database.I wonder how many problems we could sort and check if we still had access? :(

Re: I removed a virus and now outlook takes 2 min to open
 

posted for future reference if anybody needs the info.

I have just had the same problem with outlook express and xp and this fixed my problem.......taken from, (hope they don't mind me stealing it)
http://www.duxcw.com/yabbse/index.ph...;threadid=4187

"To fix this, open Regedit and navigate to this key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
\CLSID
\{FB7199AB-79BF-11d2-8D94-0000F875C541}
\InProcServer32

In the right-hand pane, double-click on the (Default) value and delete whatever is entered there, leaving it blank. Click OK. Now perform exactly the same step with the key directly underneath, namely

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
\CLSID
\{FB7199AB-79BF-11d2-8D94-0000F875C541}
\LocalServer32

Once both (Default) values are empty, OE will open normally"