Hi, here's a relatively tough one for the forum's gurus.

I'm running Windows XP SP3 on a Dell XPS M1530 laptop with Intel Core Duo at 2Ghz with 2GB RAM. I am running Office 2003 Professional Edition, Firefox, McAfee Viruscan Enterprise 8.5.0i, Windows Desktop Search 4.0, Skype and a few more apps, but not that much crap installed.

I run Outlook in cache mode, with the outlook0.ost file being at 301MB and the Exchange mailbox size is 271Mb (I just compacted the OST file). I currently have 5 PST files for 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 year emails. For professional reasons I should keep all my emails & appointments. Their sizes are respectively 0.2Gb, 1.7Gb, 2,7Gb, 3.5Gb and 3.4Gb. The current-year PST stores everything older than 2 months. I don't expect 2008 and 2009 PST files to grow over 4Gb. By the way, all PSTs are recently compacted.

I have Windows Desktop Search setup to index all PST files as this is something I really need (I might perform 10 email searches per day, 50% including 2008 emails). WDS also indexes "My Documents" with about 5.000 items, while the whole index (including the PST files) goes to about 250.000 items.

Both My Documents folder and the PST files are on an encrypted partition using Truecrypt 6.0a with Twofish. TC's benchmarks reports 125Mb/sec read and 119MbMb/sec wirte speeds with the 1Mb buffer option, averaging to 122Mb/sec. This is second to AES cipher performance which gets 138, 138 and 138 respectively. That's about 13% faster than Twofish on my system. If needed, I can change from Twofish to AES I think. However, I cannot do without encryption.

The PST files were defragmented about 15 days ago and specially the '04, '05, '06 and '07 don't get any changes nowadays.

Overall, the laptop's experience is decently good, I don't have to much crap installed in it. I can simultaneaously run Outlook, Firefox, Excel, Photoshop, Skype and something else quite well.

The problems I am experiencing are Outlook-related. When I run it, it might take a few secs to sync the inbox but that's fine. Running a WDS search will find emails pretty well & fast.

However, after a few minutes I will start getting a popup with this message:

"{mypathhere}\outlook0.ost is in use and cannot be accessed. Close any application that is using this file, and then try again".

Appart from the annoying popup (which might come in bundles of 3-4 every 10-15 minutes), the worst effect is the fact that it makes the PST files unavailable from Outlook. They still appear on the left folder menu and WDS can still find and show me their emails in the preview pane (because they are indexed) but I cannot open them. The only way around I have found so far is to restart Outlook and do the searching *before* I get the popups again.

When I travel and I have slower connections, this tends to happen more often so I suspect there's something to do with network problems... although this should not be the case at our office (where pinging the Exchange server give a consistent 1ms).

Reducing the number of open PST files open from Outlook seems to help. Right now, I have only 2007 & 2008 and I haven't being blocked for 20 minutes but this is painful because WDS is right now de-indexing the older PSTs so once I open them again (1) they will not be searchable and (2) WDS will need quite some CPU cycles and time to re-index them. So I really need to have all PSTs available at all times.

I think there might be some problem with WDS. When the popup appears, I see a few READ REQUESTS to outlook0.ost from both OUTLOOK.EXE and searchprotocolhost.exe returning a a SHARING VIOLATION error using Sysinternal's Filemon app. Many other READ REQUESTS return SUCCESS though. It's like WDS and Outlook interfere with each other until WDS blocks access to the OST and the the PST files are unreadable... !??

I hope I have given all the needed info... now it's time for you gurus help me somehow :-)

Thanks in advance
J