Do you have an AV that is scanning all incoming and outgoing messages? If so, that can slow down your downloading of messages to a crawl.. depending on how large each message is and the total number of messages you have.


It could be that the hotmail server is overloaded. Hotmail access is by far at the beta stage. And it could be that the times that you check your hotmail are the busiest for that http server.. Try differing the times that you check your hotmail through outlook and see if you notice a difference.