In the past I’ve been a proponent of Attensa add-in for Outlook mostly because I really like to have my email and RSS in one convenient location.  Unfortunately, Attensa brought my machine to a grinding halt.

First, I expect that adding all my RSS feeds to Outlook would slow down the performance when opening the app and perhaps even when closing it.  Attensa did slow down Outlook’s performance, but not to the point that I found it unbearable.  That is until last Friday.

On Friday I got home, fired up the PC and opened up my Outlook. Initially it looked like Outlook was going to work just fine.  The preview pane did not show any preview, even though an email was highlighted.  About the time I noticed this, my wireless connection disconnected, IM dropped me off the face of the earth and I began to get errors popping in my face like fire crackers at a Chinese New Years celebration.

Me being me, I opened up Task Manager (after a tedious wait where I wondered if I should just push the big button) and looked at what the hell was taking up all my resources.  Sure enough I found one process pegged at 98–99% usage and it’s name was AttensaEngine.exe.  Every time that I killed the process and re-opened Outlook, AttensaEngine.exe pegged out the usage on my machine.  I searched the web and there were numerous reports of this on Attensa’s forums (okay, I agree WmHBlair is an annoying ass) and there are no responses from Attensa that address the issue at all.

In the end I uninstalled Attensa for Outlook (v1.0.6) and have reverted to SharpReader.  According to this post by uber-blogger Scoble Outlook 12 will have the capability to do what Attensa tried.  Here’s hoping that MS does better at it.

I’m the Igloo Coder and I’m thinking that the polar bears are sweating this year.