Outlook typing delays may be caused by Internet Explorer settings

One complaint IT consultants hate to hear is “my computer is slow.” This phrase can be used to describe a virtually unlimited number of specific symptoms, and those symptoms may be caused by a virtually unlimited number of problems.

Here’s one that I’d never heard before tonight. A client told me that as he typed messages in Outlook 2007, there would be long delays between the time he pressed the keys and the time the letters appeared on his screen.

This kind of thing generally happens to computers that are very low on memory and have some sort of malware program that’s out of control. But I knew neither was the case on this PC. So I did some Googling and learned that this phenomenon may be caused by having a large number of sites in Internet Explorer’s Restricted Sites zone. Sandi Hardmeier’s blog has the details, and the problem is mentioned in several newsgroup posts. Unfortunately, there doesn’t yet seem to be a no-brainer, one-click fix. But if it’s a real problem, there are workarounds.