Outlook stuck at 'Preparing to Send/Receive'

[king1]

anyone come across this, I have a client suffering from this for quite some time.  

After opening Outlook it works fine for a while, up to several hours, but eventually it locks up when the status bar message is showing 'Preparing to Send/Receive' - and it never progresses to an actual Send/Receive...  

In one photo sent to me I could see the reminders window showing the start of a 'not responding' in the title bar...

sleep disabled 
hibernate off
outlook in safe mode does the same
killing it via task manager allows restarting Outlook but not ideal...
Office 365, windows 11. 

It's been going on for a few months now, mainly due to client not wanting to pay me to fix this up until now, must have been driving her nuts all that time... 

a simple reinstall may well sort it but just curious to know if anyone has any insights into this...

[crab2]

Outlook has been updated and I would look at the outgoing server settings

[nzoomed]

I would try creating a new profile and adding the account fresh on it, ive seen this happen from time to time, but no one single cause. I see the issue more with IMAP accounts.
Also if you are seeing more than one instance of outlook in task manager, or it working properly after terminating the process, I find that some users overload outlook by running a second instance of outlook.
This usually only happens if the user double clicks the icon on the taskbar opening 2 instances of it, sometimes users get impatient and click it again not thinking they clicked the icon either.

[zqwerty]

Some suggestions from MajorGeeks which may help:

https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page/...tlook.html