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Microsoft Outlook 2013 hangs on processing for up to an hour

Recently I discovered an issue with Lenovo T430U notebooks having an issue where when you launch Microsoft Outlook 2013 it would just sit on the blue splash screen stating “Processing”.  After capturing a lot of logs and being really stumped, I reached out the Microsoft support team. Here was the solution that was provided:

Disable hardware acceleration

  1. Run regedit
  2. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common
  3. Create a New Key and name it "Graphics"
  4. Select Graphics, right-click on the right panel and create a New DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it DisableHardwareAcceleration.
  5. Enter Value data as 1

Once I did this, the problem was resolved. I decided to see if it was a driver causing my issue since I now had graphics acceleration disabled. I ran the Lenovo system updates 5 on the computer. It downloaded the updates and installed, but I noticed it never selected the NVidia graphics driver as well as this unit also has a Intel 4000 graphics engine on it that it never found any updates for. I manually downloaded these from NVidia and a customized one from Lenovo for the Intel driver. After installing and rebooting, I changed the registry key to a value of 0 so hardware acceleration is now on which is the default. Outlook 2013 now opens correctly.

If you run into an issue like this, try and update the graphics drivers, or as a last ditch effort, disable hardware acceleration.

After writing up this article, I was able to find a Microsoft support KB article 2761977 which talks about a similar issue. My issue did not come up finding this article, but glad it is documented as well.

Lyle

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