Greetings!

I am running WinXP Pro. This is not upgrade; new installation.

Problem: Outlook Express 6 has become VERY slow loading. Once loaded, it's okay. After I did a "restore" it returned to normal. Then later, it became very, very slow loading. The spash screen stays up 30-40 seconds and the program finally appears in another 40 seconds. BTW, I ran Ad-aware, just to be sure. Nada.

I examined what I did between the period of time it worked okay and when I discovered it was slow. Script Sentry and Fresh Download were installed. Disable them but no improvement.

One thing I have noticed - this may or may not have anything to do with this, but - I disable windows messenger in group policy so that it will not run nor auto start. However, msmsgs still is in the startup sequence in System Configuration Utility:
"C:\Program Files\Messenger\msmsgs.exe" /background at location: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

1. How do I completely disable windows messenger?

2. What causes OE6 to be so slow in loading? What am I overlooking?

Thanks,

j