Q:

Does the "Cancel Server Request" option in Outlook actually do anything?

Over the years, I've had various Outlook lock-ups, largely when network connectivity is patchy, and it results in me having to kill the OUTLOOK.EXE process, re-launch it, and wait while it repairs my PST.
There's an option on the system tray icon context menu that says "Cancel server request" (I think it's been there since Outlook 2007), but I always try this first, and I've never had it resolve my interface lock-up, even when I suspect that the lock-up is related to something I've done that requires server connectivity. It makes sense if there's a "Contact the server" thread and this option raises an event on the thread telling it to stop waiting, but whether or not it stops waiting, this action never releases control of Outlook and the application remains unresponsive.
Does this option actually do anything - have people ever observed it resolving their stalled process? I don't mean to sound cynical, but I've wondered if this option was added to appease the users, and there's no actual code behind it. I know threading is complicated, and I understand the issues involved with cancelling a threading wait like this, but I've never seen this option work.

A:

It might not resolve a 'Outlook Not Responding' problem, that depends on what the actual problem is. 
Cancelling a server request does exactly that: When Outlook is requesting resources from a server (Mail, Contacts, Calendar Items, etc..), there are many things that can go wrong during the process. Sometimes this may hang up the main user interface process and cause what we perceive to be freezing or lock-ups. Cancelling the request could resolve this. On the other hand, depending on how far into the process the server request is, cancelling it may not do anything.

