Turn off e-mail scanning in your anti-virus. You will still be protected.

Do not archive mail in default OE folders. They will eventually become
corrupted. Create your own user defined folders for storing mail and move
your mail to them. Empty Deleted Items folder regularly. Keep user created
folders under 100MB, and Default folders as empty as is feasible.

After you are done, follow up by compacting your folders manually while
working *offline* and do it often.

Click on Outlook Express at the top of the folder tree so no
folders are open. Then: File>Work Offline (or double click Working Online in
the Status Bar). File>Folder>Compact all folders. Don't touch anything until
the compacting is completed.

In Tools>Options>Maintenance: Uncheck Compact messages in background and
leave it unchecked. {N/A if running XP/SP2}.

And see:
http://www.insideoe.com/problems/performance.htm
--
Bruce Hagen
MS MVP - Outlook Express
~IB-CA~

"MAL" <hubba12@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:jUdvf.3460$Hl6.456@newsread3.news.pas.earthli nk.net...
> All of a sudden my OE part of IE6 has become very slow in opening
> messages.
> I have Earthlink DSL and it works fine. When I download the message
> headers, it goes very fast. Then I try to open an individual message and
> it
> struggles and hangs up and goes very slow compared to how it worked just a
> few days ago. Eventually the file opens. This seems to happen every
> other
> time. If I try to open a file and it goes slow and I quickly cancel it
> and
> try again, it goes as fast as before. If I combine and decode a list of
> messages, it seems to do half of them fast and half of them very slow.
> ????
> It is as if some setting is wrong but I cannot figure it out. Any help
> would sure be appreciated. Mail works fine, same as always.
>
>