You know me – I'm a diehard Outlook 2000 user. I tried Outlook XP and found its flaws to be unbearable. Most likely, that's because I'm not connecting to an Exchange server. I'll explain that more in just a moment. Anyway, I decided to give Office 2000 SP3 a go. For the most part, the upgrade went smoothly. Tonight, however, I noticed that Outlook was taking 100% of my CPU time after running for less than a minute. At first, I thought it was because of HTML messages. Then, I thought it was because of the amount of unread messages in a folder. Nope. I deleted extraneous messages, compacted the PST, and the errant behavior was (again) monopolizing my processor. Defrag? Still sucking cycles. I tried darn near everything I could think of – except for the obvious. A hack. The Outlook 2000 team's shortsighted wisdom caused me to find a way to gain access to certain attachments (URL files, etc.). I had to edit OUTLLIB.DLL in a hex editor. This workaround worked well in the past. Well, that may no longer be the case for some of us. At least, for me.

I had to replace the 'hacked' version with my old one (pre SP-3). Now, the updated attachments workaround doesn't work. Might anybody out there have a SP-3 OUTLLIB.DLL they can e-mail me? I'd appreciate it. UPDATE: I patched Gretchen's system and copied the DLL from that. All is well with the world once more. I must thank Slipstick for the pointer to the Attachment Options COM add-in. Wonderful!