Just thought I¹d share this with the list, in case it¹s of any use to someone else.
For about the last 8 or 9 months. I had been experiencing freezing in Entourage whenever new mail was being received. When I first encountered the problem, I posted to the list and learned that this was a well-known problem without a clear fix. Some people told me they resolved it by deleting emails from their database. I tried that over the holidays last year but it didn¹t fix it for me. Yesterday, I decided to archive and delete some older projects in Project Center. From what I can tell, I make fairly intensive use of the Project Center, with anywhere from 40 to 150 projects at any given time. Some of the projects involve dozens of emails and thousands of files, notes, events, tasks, and so forth. Even though it¹s about half-baked, the Project Center has become nearly indispensable for me. While archiving some projects, I came across three that would not archive. Each time I tried, the backup would abort, claiming that I stopped it before completion (even though I had not). When I looked at the project folder in the Finder, everything looked OK (they were not particularly large and only had a few dozen files involved). However, when I looked at the ³Files² tab each of the projects via Project Center, all three displayed a file named ³Picture 1² that did not have an icon. When I tried double-clicking these files I got an error message. Thinking my database was damaged, I checked it, but the database tool said it was OK. I rebuilt it anyway, but the files were still there. I then manually deleted them from within the database, and voila, the three projects then archived without a hitch. I then worked my way through the list of projects, until I hit another one that would not archive. When I clicked the ³Backup² button, it completely locked up Entourage and required a Force Quit to recover. When I examined the project in Overview, the Project Center indicated that there were over 7000 items displayed, which was strange because there were only 41 mail messages, and 38 files and folders, and only a half dozen other items in the other tabs. However, I did have a couple of folders inside the main project folder that each had thousands of files in them, with hundreds of megs of data. I suspect somehow that the Project Center was ³reading through² the folders, and/or that the backup was choking on the amount of data. Anyway, I decided to zip the mega-folders in order to create single zip files of each. When I did this, the project then successfully archived and deleted. When I finally finished the archive/delete process, I had removed about 100 projects, and the freezing problem also completely disappeared. Not sure what the culprit was, but I¹m guessing that it was the volume of projects, either in number or size, that was causing Entourage to freeze. YMMV yada yada, Dan Dixon
