Outlook 2003 hangs way too much.

Hi guys, I use Outlook 2003 at work and I used to have a Microsoft Exchange
account in the past. Currently I only keep it's messages in one PST file as
my new account is through Gmail service. Although it used to hang in the
past too, it now hangs way too often and for way too long. Tasks, such as
moving emails from my inbox to the appropriate folder to the left are often
extremely time consuming. I don't know what to do to solve this but this
needs to change. I've been even tempted to switch to Thunderbird but I
really like Outlook (when it performs well).

I'd like to say, I have Google Desktop tool installed and also the number of
folders to the left are a lot. I tend to create a few every day. Just in
case these two things were behind all this sluggishness, I hope they don't as
I think they're crucial to my performance.

And lastly, occasionally I get a "connection to the Microsoft Exchange
server wasn't possible" kind of message, is there any way I can disable the
attempts to connect to the MS Exchange server (since I no longer work through
it) but without loosing my saved data? I suppose I can, but how?

Thanks all very much for your help.