Why is Outlook 2002's POP handling so slow?

I ran Outlook against my POP3 server just now and once again was unimpressed by the speed that messages were being downloaded. It seems that Outlook 2002, over an SSL link to a POP3 server (so no anti-virus weirdness is going on) takes about half a second per message to download a large number of really small messages, from a server on the same machine…

Because I’m curious, and because it doesn’t appear to be a server issue as the server idles the whole time, I ran up Outlook Express and pointed that at the server (same SSL connection), it flew. Almost 100 x faster (totally unmeasured ‘user interface responsiveness’)… It was so much faster that I pointed it at a copy of my ‘all the mail I’ve been collecting for test purposes’ account which currently contains around 17000 messages… No problem at all, Outlook would still be processing message 100…

Most strange… Why’s Outlook so crap then?