Outlook express, IE and netmeeting major problems.

A very strange bug or something has once again cursed my computer! months and months ago i upgraded to windowsXP from win2000 because of this very problem. I've since returned to win2000 and have been fine for about 3weeks, but now its happening again and its very frustrating.

When i open Outlook express6 it takes about 2mins before the program opens, after i click the icon. Internet explorer6 locks up for around a minute when i type information into a form, or on a search engine, then carries on fine. Netmeeting trys to load but just hangs at the welcome to netmeeting splash screen. Has anyone heard anything like this before and if so, what can i do???

I've ruled out a virus, well used norton 2002 and that found nothing. I've tried reverting back to IE/OE5 but that didn't help. I've also reinstalled SP2.

I believe this must be some kind of weird software conflict or something but once its here i can't seem to get rid of it, reformatting would solve my problem but surely theres another easier method. Could it have something to do with the explorer shell?

Sorry to go on, and i hope that enough information for you all.
Cheers,


My system:
AMD athlon 1.4
Abit KG7-RAID
256ddr ram
30gb ibm GXP75
10gb Maxtor
Teac 4x4x32 cd-rw
Sony 16/48 DVD
100mb zip drive
Voodoo 5500
Soundblaster live!1024 player
Hollywood+ decoder card
Internet PCI modem
Dlink 10/100 NIC

Windows 2000 SP2 installed and latest updates.

The problem you are experiancing has been an on going battle between Msn services and the rest of Microsoft. Msn messenger causes entire machines to hang when ran as a user. if at any time you updated your machine to have Msn messenger connectivity update 4.6 it will freeze outlook/outlook express for extended periods of time.
To fix this problem go and get the latest version of Messenger and install it on the machine having the problems. Next you will need to run this code to remove the program. you will need a copy of the msmsgs.inf in the messenger folder to remove it. The file can be extracted from the setup files downloaded when installing the program. The other alternative is to make sure that you have an administrative account. The following code can be copied into a batch file and run.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection C:\"program files"\messenger\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove"


del "C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Start Menu\Programs\Windows Messenger.lnk" /q
del "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Windows Messenger.lnk" /q
rd C:\progra~1\messenger /s /q
---------------------------------------------------------------------

This is also an effective way to remove messenger from Windows Xp if needed.

I have seen this problem when stopping or disabling certain services to gain performance. It can be a real headache.