Can I trigger a VBA script without pausing Outlook for the duration?

This might seem a little backwards, but I've spent the last 9 months developing a complicated system of very effective VBA scripts for Outlook automation, but now I'm asking a fairly simple n00b question.

Can I have Outlook run a script, but leave Outlook usable whilst running it?

Background: despite having the VBA code for Event triggers to launch scripts when an email arrives, I've not found it to be reliable enough (admittedly I've not tried it again since I upgraded from 2003 to 2010 - so I might try it again). So instead, I use an Outlook Rule to trigger the script when an email arrives with certain keywords (e.g. when an attached report arrives with AUTORUN in the mail subject). But this approach hangs Outlook throughout the script, and if something is taking longer than expected to run, e.g. if a shared drive is particularly slow (or as happened last week, if I've made a mistake in the setup and I'm running an Update query that takes 6 hours to run!!), I've rendered Outlook unusable for a whole day. I don't know if switching to Event triggers would even change that.

I've thought about creating a new Outlook.Application instead of using the intrinsic Application object but my experience with Excel VBA tells me that that wouldn't make any difference. However, with no formal training in VBA maybe I've missed a trick there too...!!

I've also thought about manually starting a new session of Outlook but I'm worried that'll just start running the same scripts twice......

I've also just thought that maybe using Shell is the answer...?

Help appreciated, and sorry if I've posted this in the wrong support forum

Event triggers would still hang outlook, vba works by running one command at a time, you can't "multithread" (run two scripts at the same time). There are some examples of ways to simulate multi-threading but I don't think that would work very well for your purposes.

I'd approach this by writing scripts as a console application/.exe and then calling these scripts from within outlook. I think that would allow you to end the macro in outlook and stop it hanging.

Also - now then mosher.

Edit: If you manually started a new instance of outlook that would be responsive - I'd suggest trying it to see if it called the same script again.

Heh, small world!

Starting a new Outlook session seems to have started running more scripts automatically - for some reason my first attempt of running "outlook /safe" didn't work - as the new session is not responding. However, judging by what Firefox is downloading, it doesn't appear to be running the same scripts, which is a relief, so I guess it might well chunk through the triggers in the inbox a bit quicker as a result. Or maybe it's just hanging whilst the first session is running VBA.

I'm intrigued by what you mean by "writing scripts as a console application/.exe and then calling these scripts from within outlook"? Do you mean running via Shell cmd? (I can see how that'd work as for another macro I have to use ShellAndWait to pause VBA while 7zip command line finishes its business.) Or if I've not grasped that, any good resources to start me off with that?

EDIT: to be clear, I think what I'm doing that might only be of limited use. My process is as follows
1. save attachment/download CSV via hyperlink in email
2. start Excel, open WB, macro to update database from new CSV and push out reports runs on Workbook_Open event, then closes Excel when finished
3. file email in specific folder

So essentially I want to drop back into Outlook and do step three immediately after launching step 2