Got gmail swapped to IMAP now, much better, thanks for the tip regarding the availability (not that I needed it as such, it is a rarely used backup account only!).
I have a few...issues with any version of Outlook. I'd love more calendar integration (come on Thunderbird team! I use Sunbird for goodness sakes

) but there are little things that just fail for me, especially crashes (and no ribbon stuff in 2007, terrible preferences, buried options, poor pasting support, poor quoting, etc) - even with a corporate setup account too. No plugins for some of the Thunderbird stuff I use also doesn't help. At least it generally works just fine if you like the interface, which is more I can say about some of Microsoft's software (and lets not go into Hotmail, where this discussion originated from!).