Outlook loses focus whilst composing email

Hi.

I have Outlook 2007 running on Win 7 Pro x64, connected to a remote (hosted) Exchange Server.

From time to time, when I'm composing email, Outlook seems to lose focus on the active window. This is frustrating as you end up typing away but the text doesn't actually appear in the mail.

If you wait a few (10-30) seconds focus usually returns, but you have to re-type everything you missed. Alternatively you can force focus to return (if you notice the behaviour) by clicking back in the window.

A couple of colleagues have noticed the same behaviour - all with Win 7 x64 and Outlook (one reports the same behaviour with LiveMail) - so I was wondering if it's a known issue, and if any work-arounds are known?

I have already tried disabling Windows Search, both within Outlook and by shutting down the Service, but that seems to make no difference. Neither did disabling my AV solution (MSFT Security Essentials...)

Any help or advice?

Foredeck

Maybe the auto-archive or auto mail check/send feature is kicking in and taking focus from the message window?

You could have a program running in the background that is grabbing focus when it does its task or updates.

Are the problem machines desktops? If it is a laptop, make sure that you're not touching the track pad by mistake (disable it.)

foredeck said:

Hi.

I have Outlook 2007 running on Win 7 Pro x64, connected to a remote (hosted) Exchange Server.

From time to time, when I'm composing email, Outlook seems to lose focus on the active window. This is frustrating as you end up typing away but the text doesn't actually appear in the mail.

If you wait a few (10-30) seconds focus usually returns, but you have to re-type everything you missed. Alternatively you can force focus to return (if you notice the behavior) by clicking back in the window.

A couple of colleagues have noticed the same behaviour - all with Win 7 x64 and Outlook (one reports the same behaviour with LiveMail) - so I was wondering if it's a known issue, and if any work-arounds are known?

I have already tried disabling Windows Search, both within Outlook and by shutting down the Service, but that seems to make no difference. Neither did disabling my AV solution (MSFT Security Essentials...)

Any help or advice?

Foredeck

Hmmm...

None of these seem to help. Affected machine(s) are laptops, but track-pads are disabled (in fact we use USB keyboards, so there's no danger of accidental contact) and changing send-receive doesn't seem to help either.

I found this thread: Outlook 2010 Freezes when typing email

Which suggests that images in the email sig may be an issue, but I don't have those, or that indexing may play a part - again I've disabled that to no effect.

So any more clues?

Thanks

Foredeck

I had this issue as well. While your particular solution might be different, I finally traced this to a hardware driver issue for any who might chance upon this post.

Long story short: Changed the Logitech Setpoint drivers for my bluetooth keyboard to the latest 64 bit driver and all is well, issue gone. All addins added back in, no issues with Outlook "flashing" or losing focus" every 30 seconds.

Strange that only Outlook evidenced symptoms of this driver problem.