I reinstalled Office 2003 last week, and was able to successfully install everything again, including the latest service pack. At first, Outlook seemed more responsive, but over time it became clear that performance would degrade the longer I left it running.

So, using the Outlook Add-In Utility which comes free as part of Bells & Whistles (Marc explains that here), I started searching for add-ins that I could remove. I did find some vestiges of previous desktop search applications that I am not currently using, and although the engines for those search products were not running, it appears that the component they load into Outlook was still being loaded. I completely uninstalled them to ensure that no extra code was getting loaded in Outlook that did not need to be.

Next, I’ve temporarily stopped using Desktop Sidebar, which hurts because I really like it. I keep trying to figure out which other utility I can live without, and right now Desktop Sidebar is the next candidate.

The add-ins that are still active as listed by the Outlook Add-in Utility include:
- Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In
- Microsoft VBA for Outlook Addin (not sure what this is for, but I’m afraid to disable it)
- OutlookShutdown for Outlook
- anagram Add-In for Outlook
- MailFiler
- Outlook Backup Addin
- Spambayes

One thing that makes me a little nervous is that a few of my add-ins are listed twice, and one (NewsGator) is listed as Active even though it has been completely uninstalled from my system. If anyone knows of a way that I can manually purge some of the old non-current items that appear in this list, please leave a comment. I’m positive it’s a registry key somewhere, but who knows where that is.

I guess if stopping use of Desktop Sidebar doesn’t help, I’ll have to start picking items off of the list above to kill. I find all of them very useful, so it’s going to hurt if it gets to that point.

[Update] Well, it’s acting a slow as it ever did after a few hours of work. What dies next?