I'd noticed that Windows Live Mail would be very sluggish to start up on my computer, both my current Windows 7 machine and the previous Windows XP PC.
Symptom would be that opening the program would take some time, after the splash screen. part of the window would appear then there would be a delay and the rest would appear. It also seemed quite sluggish in use.
As far as I can remember it's always been like this, and hadn't suddenly "broken". I put it down to being poorly written.
Last week, I had a curious problem where using BCC to send to a local email list would result in emails being delivered to apparently random members of the list but not all, or to none at all, with no errors to warn that something hadn't worked.
In trying to fix this, I had been directed to a repair/remove function of Windows Live Essentials. Running the repair option did not, sadly, fix the BCC email list problem, but since then I've found that Windows Live Mail starts up a great deal faster!
I've tried it on a 2nd Windows XP computer with similar results.
As I was so delighted with this, I thought I'd share it with the forum in case anyone else thinks Windows Live Mail is slow, or wants to give it a try to see what happens
Open Windows Explorer
Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Installer (for 64 bit Windows)
or C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Installer (for 32 bit Windows)
and look for WLARP.EXE
Run this. It took a little while to appear to do anything on my computer.
A window appears, asking you to choose to Uninstall parts of Windows Live or to repair all of it.
Choose repair.
It will chunter away, and may want a reboot afterwards.
If it's like my experience, your Windows Live Mail will start significantly faster in future.
Obviously, I urge caution to randomly doing stuff like this - best to have a backup. So far as I can tell, I've had no ill effects - all my emails are still there!
[I'm using Windows Live Mail 2012 on Windows 7; before that I was using Windows Live Mail 2009 on Windows XP.]
Ian