Yeah, Outlook is a pain. When I got back from my vacation this summer and started Outlook, I thought it had hanged since it wasn't responding. So I brought up KMail, and it started downloading a big bunch of mails (I used to get a lot of status mails from cron jobs).

It turned out Outlook was doing the same thing, but for some reason it couldn't imagine I would be interested in knowing what was going on.