I have recently been trialling emoze, a free push email solution, for delivering my personal email to my Nokia phone. I’ll blog about that at some point in the future. However, using it has highlighted an interesting issue with Outlook- it never closes. Yes, it appears to close but the outlook.exe process is still running. This has a number of unwanted side effects beside continuing to use vast quantities of memory. In my case if continued to download my mail preventing emoze from working correctly.

Searching the net I found a good article about the problem on Mike Swanson’s blog. While this didn’t give a way of actually solving the problem it did highlight a few ways of dealing with it, including a small system tray utility called KnockOut which allows the problem to be managed. The root cause may well be to do with an Outlook plug in with SyncMyCal or iTunes being likely culprits. No one knows, or perhaps no one is saying, who is to blame. Is it that the plug in doesn’t release Outlook correctly or the other way round? Whatever the only sure fire way of getting rid of it is to kill the process.

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