All day, I've been having outlook 2007 problems. It was fine for the past 6 months, and all of a sudden, extremely slow today where I could not use my quad-core laptop. It stopped chrome from accessing the internet! If I killed Outlook, everything returned to normal.
After troubleshooting all day (literally 8 hours), I stumbled on a website that had the answer to this problem:
Turns out the index was corrupt and trying to rebuild all the time.