“Enable all PST files found..” kills Outlook and X1

[qbit]

I have been using X1 for years with little issues. (except for outlook complaining about the X1 plugin and wanting to disable it)

Previously I only used it to scan pst files that were open in my outlook profile. But when I moved to a new Laptop recently (Win 7 Enterprise, Office 2016) I decided to try the “enable all PST files found for scanning” option. Because it sounded nice to be able to look in old pst files that are not in daily use in the outlook profile.

Unfortunately that turned out to be a bad idea.

Apparently the way X1 does the "all pst" thing is by seting up an individual outlook profile for each pst file that it finds somewhere. So I ended up with dozens of profiles in my mail profile list.
And outlook did not take kindly to that: every other time when starting it after hibernate it would hang up while the splash screen was showing “Loading Profile”. It simply would not progress past that point for a very long time (I never tried more than 10min, but that’s pointless anyway).
This was a serious issue a few times when I needed to open outlook to open the next online meeting…

Then I started noticing that X1 would also hang up: while indexing mail it would get stuck in one pst file and never progress past it, thus never completing a full scan of outlook. The files scan still worked fine. I believe it got stuck in pst files that were open in outlook and also had a separate X1 mail profile.
Deleting index files did not help, reinstalling X1 while keeping user data did not help, reinstalling with deleting user data did not help. Switching off the “enable all PST files..” option and deselecting the extea pst.’s in the scan setup did not help
But when I deleted all those pst-related outlook profiles and reinstalled x1 without the “all pst” option the issue seemed to go away. (knock on wood so far…)

So I think the bug is somewhere in the “Enable all PST files found for scanning” feature.

Would be interested to hear when that gets fixed.

[Kenward]

Interesting.

I have not enabled "all PST files".

Instead a create my own Outlook profile (with no associated email accounts) that points to the PST files that I wan t to index. In this way X1 will index PST files that are not open in Outlook.

I can't remember when I started this practice, maybe 10 years ago, but I vaguely recall that it was suggested by someone at X1.

[qbit]

@Kenward, thanks for the tip, that seems to be a less messy idea for the .pst files that are not open in outlook.
But I think it might have to do with the ones that ARE open in outlook....

Unfortunately it seems that the issue with outlook has not completely gone away with the fix I described above.
I had the hang-during-"loading profile"- a couple of times since. It's far less frequent now, but it still seems to happen.
The only way out is a reboot of Windows, and then I usually start outlook before X1. (no X1 autostart)
I haven't seen any issues with X1 indexing recently.

I realized that the "loading profile" is when outlook opens those .pst files that are open in the active profile. (because when I moved some of them while outlook was off, I got an error message upon starting outlook, during that splash screen at that "loading profile" point in the splash sequence).
So now I'm guessing that there is a conflict between outlook and X1 acessing the same .pst file at the same time. That seemed to work well with outlook 2013, which I had before, but somehow it seems to cause issues now in outlook 2016.

... still hoping that someone gets to look into this, because an unresponsive outlook is a serious issue when you are in a hurry...

[Kenward]

So now I'm guessing that there is a conflict between outlook and X1 acessing the same .pst file at the same time.

I don't see this. Even without using an archive profile I can have a pile of pst files open in Outlook and X1 handles them OK. No sign of slowdowns or hangs.

So if you see a problem it is not universal and may be related to your local setup.

I have about half a dozen active PST files weighing in at around 22 GB.