Compared to me you're lucky ! Just about the same thing happens on mine,
but can last for 5 minutes or longer.
I've traced it down to having something to do with either compacting
messages/items in a folder or searching for links in a very long message or
document. No too surprised it affects MS Office, IE and OE as I understand
they share quite a bit of common code - probably in DLLs or something.
Unfortunately I haven't a clue what to do about it, so if somebody comes up
with a solution it will benefit us both.

Using Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird as replacements for the MS apps
does seem to remove the problem, though.
Kevin.
Chef! <> wrote:
| Not quite sure if it's a W2K problem, but here goes. I have W2K Pro
| SP4, Office XP SP1, IE6 SP1. My day to day running has Outlook for
| mail and IE on all the time and, most of the time, OE for newsgroups.
| Every now and then - no particular time pattern/schedule - these 3
| apps just halt i.e. no mouse or keyboard response and if you switch
| between these apps the graphics goes 'blank' on these 3 apps. This
| lasts for anything between 10 - 20 seconds and can cycle between 1 -
| 4 hours at a time. Any other apps running along side are unaffected
| and I can go to 'Task Manager' and minimise to Desktop quite happily.
| There's plenty of RAM left. It's just the 3 Apps that the problem
| appears to be occuring on. The OS was recently cleanly reinstalled
| and still the problem persists. Any users here or within the other
| groups experienced such a problem and know of a cure or can pinpoint
| to the culprit?