Question about Outlook Express

My OS:

Win XP SP3

IE v 8.0.6001.18702IC

Silverlight v 5.1.20513.0

I have migrated from hotmail to outlook.com and am at the point ditching my hotmail email address and moving to google mail. I cannot believe that Microsoft has so irresponsibly launched a new email service that is so riddled with problems, doesn't even allow attaching files and seems to have conflicts with other components of the MS suite of applications!!

And this issue seems to have been dragging on for months and months! Unforgivable.

My problem is as follows:

• I create a new email
• I click on the "Insert" button
• I click on "Files as Attachments"
• I select a file to attach
• If it's a tiny file (eg. a 32kb .txt notepad document or a 172kb .jpg image file), it will immediately attach, no problem
• But if it's anything like a 1.3mb pdf doc or larger, the blue status bar moves all the way across the icon that repesents the document, but it never completes. The uploaded status remains as "Uploaded 0 of 1"
• If it's an even bigger document, eg. an 8mb zip file, the blue bar never even appears. I just see the green status segment bar in the status bar of IE bottom of screen, growing until complete, but again the job never completes.

And yes, I've already tried:

• uninstalling and re-installing Silverlight
• re-setting IE back to its virginal install state
• etc

I am seriously, very unhappy.

MS is about to lose a 15 year hotmail customer!