mr_d

I had a similar problem and I just fixed it, I don't know if its the same as yours...when I went to use the instant search in either contacts or past mail, my outlook froze and I had to restart it. My problem was my .pst file was corrupted for some reason. First I located where my .pst was located by hiting file -> open --> outlook data file once I knew the location, I applied scanpst.exe to the file. I found my scanpst.exe file in Program Files --> Microsoft Office --> Office 12 but if its not there, you can download the program, just google it then I applied scanpst.exe to my .pst file, it said there were major errors that it had to repair, clicked repair and 15 minutes later everything worked again... good luck, hope this helped