I am working directly on the PC to which RH is installed, and
I am not using source control.
I tried the sample projects and had no problems opening
topics, though there are also times when I have no problems opening
topics in my own project (as I mentioned, the bad behavior doesn't
happen consistently).
Maybe certain characteristics of my project are contributing
to the problem. The project was converted from RoboHelp X5, for one
thing. It's also large (>50MB), and the topics are all in one
directory instead of being organized into subdirectories (something
I'm hoping to remedy when I have time; I inhereited the project
only recently).
Still, I don't see how any of those issues would be overcome
simply by closing Outlook.
It's pretty odd.