Other reports of problems
You know, if one person, just one person has problems with Outlook's performance, you might think his computer's really sick.

And if two people, two people do it in harmony, you might think they're both Outlook experts and their problems are unique.

And if three people have problems, three, can you imagine, three people loading up Outlook, finding it's slow, and quiting out? You may think it's a serious problem.

And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day having problems with Outlook's performance and quitting out? And, friends, you may think it's a movement.

My deepest apologies to Arlo Guthrie! Unfortunately, we're beginning to see a movement.

Outlook 2007 crawls
Jason Busch, on his SpendMatters blog reports:

Vista, Office and Outlook 2007 are a nightmare.

The problem -- which is absolutely inexcusable -- is that Office 2007 (Outlook, specifically) crawls, even on this superfast machine. The hard-drive is also constantly in motion, slowing things down even more. I'm not alone in these observations.

I followed the advice of a comment to uninstall the Cyberlink Outlook Addin and things have improved. It is now marginally acceptable (and Safe Mode flies at the old rate of Office 2003). But even now, Outlook 2007 is still not close to the performance of Outlook 2003 on a two year old machine. However, at least it is workable (with every possible feature, viewer, and the indexing turned off).

Outlook does not slow down gracefully
Tim Anderson, on his ITWriting blog, reports:

Outlook 2007 is slow, RSS broken

Users are reporting that Outlook 2007 is slow -- much slower than Outlook 2003, which it is meant to replace. Experiences vary, but the worst affected are those with large mailboxes. Large in this context means thousands of messages and several GB size.

I'm also disappointed that, for all the talk of user experience, the new Outlook does not slow down gracefully. You know the kind of thing: you start the application and an unresponsive, semi-painted window appears for a while. You click to change folders and the application appears to hang. You click to drop-down a menu and the application freezes for several seconds.

Not the PCs fault
Computerworld reports:

Outlook 2007 users complain about slow performance

Early users of Outlook 2007, the latest version of Microsoft Corp.'s market-leading email client, are voicing widespread complaints about the software's sluggish performance.

Symptoms being reported by users include temporary freezes when commands are executed or windows are opened, an inability of Outlook to keep up with text as it is being typed and slowness in sending and receiving emails.

Most of the problems don't appear to be the result of underpowered PCs or of faulty or misconfigured email servers. Instead, users say, and Microsoft acknowledges, the underlying cause is changes made under Outlook's hood to accommodate new features such as RSS feeds and indexing for faster searches.