Shutting Down Outlook

This is one of those things that I thought only happened to me. For years, I've been running multiple Outlook profiles: one for my personal e-mail, and one for my Microsoft e-mail. It's quite common for me to exit Outlook and fire it up again so I can check a different e-mail account. As a matter of fact, I do this many times each day. Unfortunately, a quick re-start of Outlook doesn't always work, because the OUTLOOK.EXE process usually hangs around for awhile before it terminates. I'm not afraid to admit that I'm quite used to popping up Task Manager to see if the process is closed, and if I get too impatient, I close it myself. Come on...admit it...you've done it too (dad...if you're reading this, I'll explain what Task Manager is later). :-)

Like I said, I thought it was a problem that was unique to me. However, I received an e-mail today that not only confirmed that I wasn't alone, but it actually contained a suggestion for eliminating this problem altogether! If this information is to be believed, closing Outlook by clicking on the X doesn't always shutdown the OUTLOOK.EXE and WINWORD.EXE processes right away; but, if you use File/Exit, both processes shut down immediately. Of course, I've been trying to test this tonight, but Outlook is closing immediately in all cases...kind of like the car that doesn't squeak when you drive it to the dealership.

While searching the internet for similar cases, and I've found a few other solutions:

• KnockOut - a tool that sits in your system tray and lets you know if the Outlook or Word processes are currently running
• Shutdown Addin - a tool that helps Outlook shut down more quickly, and if it doesn't after a period of time, the addin forcefully terminates the process
• A list of software that may cause problems

If you can confirm that File/Exit does the trick, please post feedback!