Hi, Whenever I open a program that requires showing a directory tree and it hangs, I click on Outlook and it is always in the middle of connecting to the server. With some programs they slow down when Outlook 2000 is trying to connect. I have 500 meg of memory and a 1.5 gig chip with a 40 gig hard drive. My question is will this be something that goes away with upgrading to Outlook 2003? Will this still happen if I just use Outlook Express? The slow down also happened when I used to run Eudora. But the directory tree thing never happened. I was having problems with Vonage when outlook tried to connect and I was trying to use the phone at the same exact time. But increasing the upload speed took care of that. (8k down, 700 up) Any ideas on correcting this? When I used Outlook in the past on computers which had smaller processors and far less memory and I hadn't seen this happen. Glen