Outlook snappiness

I have been using Outlook as my mail and calendar app on my Asus Eee PC and have been very frustrated lately about how slooooow it is. I have moved a lot of the older mail into separate databases and am compacting all of them on a regular basis but it just never seemed to make any difference. Earlier in the week I deleted everything in the Deleted Items folder and compacted again. Now Outlook is quite snappy! Things you learn...