Using Classic Outlook on Windows for personal email, calendar, and contact management
Yes I thought I might have jinxed it!! After the update installed successfully I noticed that the 47k items waiting to be indexed was reducing rapidly - 20 or so at a go and later in the day I noticed that items to be indexed was at 0 and the items indexed was at 290k. Also more usefully in Outlook the items waiting to be indexed had also gone down to 0. This seemed to be the case all the remainder of the day. With the speed up of indexing and 0 items remaining I made the rash decision that it had been fixed.
After your message I looked again and while the indexing does seem to be much quicker it is just recycling around the 4k items to be indexed. I gets down to 3800 items or so then suddenly jumps back to 5k items to be indexed. This just seems to go round and round making no progress. And Outlook index waiting to be indexed just keeps on growing with no reduction.
So it seems that they have speeded up indexing but not solved the issue.