As a long time user of Outlook, I have rarely had problems.  On my main machine (Windows XP SP2, with 2GB memory), I often discover through Task Manager that Outlook’s process outlook.exe is gobbling up huge amounts of memory which can affect my system’s performance. 

Half of the time, I simply ignore the fact that it is consuming over 300MB of memory - yes, that’s 300 of my 2048 MB of memory.  However, there are times when I have at least a dozen programs open and must be vigilant of memory usage or my overall productivity will fail.

To reduce Outlook’s memory usage, I have tried:

1. Reducing the size of the .pst files - works to some degree
2. Moving email messages out of the Inbox and into other folders - helps with the overall performance and startup of Outlook
3. Minimize Outlook, then Maximizing it again, which is recommended by this KB article from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827310

I’m not overly concerned by its behavior, but, I would like to have a way to control the maximum amount of memory used.