I was troubleshooting a computer the other day that was having Outlook freezing issues. This is what would happen. When previewing an Excel attachment in Outlook (2016) the document would preview but as soon as you would scroll around on the attachment, Outlook would freeze. You couldn’t open, close, or minimize Outlook. However, if you went into Task Manager to kill the program, Outlook appeared to be working normally and didn’t mention “Not Responding”.
After a bit more troubleshooting, I found when Outlook froze up, if I opened a File Explorer Window it would unfreeze Outlook and I could once again use.
Another item I noticed was Outlook seemed to freeze when I used my mouse scroll wheel instead of the scroll bars on the previewed Excel document. I tried my hypothesis a couple times and sure enough, each time I scrolled the previewed Excel document with my mouse scroll wheel Outlook would freeze up.
Troubleshooting Steps I tried:
- I installed the latest Office updates.
- I opened Outlook in Safe Mode.
- I made sure all Add-Ins were disabled.
- I ran Outlook as an Administrator
- I disabled all Preview Handlers in Outlook and then re-enabled.