Office docs very slow to load.

[Number6]

I previously posted this in the office forum but got no replies. I'm now reposting in the Windows forum just in case anyone here has a different slant on it.

Win XP Pro workstations (1 x PC + 1 x laptop), fully patched on a 2007 network.

If MS Office 2003 Word or Excel files are double-clicked from within explorer or My Computer both the app and the document take almost a minute to open. If, however, the app is opened from the start menu and then the same doc is opened from file > open then both open instantly.

I have tried several things to try and alleviate this problem such as:

1) editing the file > open settings from the tools > file options of My Computer. I've removed the DDE linkage which in some cases solves the problem but in other cases just gives rise to other errors such as file permissin errors.

2) I've edited out the data and options registry keys for word, this results in the first attempt to open a document working instantly but on all subsequent attempts the problem re-occurs.

3) I cleared out all temp files, etc.

4) I did a system restore back to a point before the first occurrence of the problem.

Nothing works

The problem only occurs on these two PC's (out of several hundred) and there's no common ground that might lead me to an explanation.

Has anyone had any experience of this? Anyone found a resolution?

[elsiegee40]

The only time I've had anything similar ti this was a problem with Symantec taking flippin' ages to scan the document on opening, but that was consistant no matter how the document was opened.

I ended up re-installing the client end on the machines affected.

[box_l]

we have a small primary that has one single pc that does this.

its an oem build leonovo thinkstation. no other machines have this issue.

i have had no luck with any fixes.

i plan to do a rebuild.

BoX

[AyatollahPies]

Do you have any mapped network drives that are currently not connected?

I came across a school recently with a similar sounding issue, and I found a website that states that Office 2003 has problems opening documents when you have mapped network drives that are unreachable.

As soon as I removed the mapping, which wasn;t needed anyway, Office opened documents straight away.

[Number6]

The only time I've had anything similar ti this was a problem with Symantec taking flippin' ages to scan the document on opening, but that was consistant no matter how the document was opened.

I ended up re-installing the client end on the machines affected.

Not a symantec issue.

All our machines are protected by Sophos and this issue only affects a limited number of machines.

we have a small primary that has one single pc that does this.

its an oem build leonovo thinkstation. no other machines have this issue.

i have had no luck with any fixes.

i plan to do a rebuild.

BoX

We may yet be forced into a rebuild of the affected machines but finding a reason first, even if not a solveable reason would be good.

Do you have any mapped network drives that are currently not connected?

I came across a school recently with a similar sounding issue, and I found a website that states that Office 2003 has problems opening documents when you have mapped network drives that are unreachable.

As soon as I removed the mapping, which wasn;t needed anyway, Office opened documents straight away.

No, all drive mappings are current and are used.

The problem only manifests itself when a document is opened by browsing to it in explorer or My Computer and double-clicking it. If Word or Excel is opened first and the same document opened via File > Open then there's no issue, both the app and the document open instantly. It also only happens with Word and Excel docs, powerpoint is unaffected.

Thanks for the suggestions, all are welcome.

[Jon]

Here are a couple of links that helped solve this problem for me

Documents take long time to open in Word 2003

Your Word documents take a long time to open when they have attached templates

Hope this is of some help to you.

[Michael]

I had a similar problem recently. Open an Excel 2002 file within Explorer and there's a noticeable pause. Open Excel 2002 first, then open the file and it was pretty much instant. Makes absolutely no sense. It only happens with Excel, not Word, PowerPoint or anything else. And this was a newly imaged machine too.

[Number6]

I'm semi-convinced it's a DDE issue.

When opening a document by double clicking in explorer a DDE link has to be set up and the correct application with which to open the document has to be determined; when opening from within Word the application is obviously already known so the DDE link is pre-determined. I don't know enough about the mechanics of DDE though to investigate further.

My level of suspicion is increased by the fact that the affected machines all run a bespoke database client that presumably also uses DDE and maybe this is interfering with the Office DDE process? I need to remove a client to see if the Office problem then also disappears but finding time to do this when the machine is in almost constant use is a problem.

[ricki]

HI

I have had a similar problem when the server died that stored the original location from where office was install from and I had to log on administrator and open word and it would bring up a box asking for the location of the install files.

This altered the following key that I exported and installed on the machines with gpo.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Prod ucts\904010001E872D116BF00006799C897E\SourceList\

Just an idea

Richard

[Mako]

Hi, first post so here goes.

We had a similar problem in our school. All office documents would take literally minutes to open when double clicked, but were fine when opened from within the program. We found out that it was due to a zipping program we had installed, called JustZipIt (do NOT use this, ever!). The program created GUI commands attached to the windows shell, so when any document was right clicked you could "Just Zip It".

I would suggest you run ProcMon, RegMon, TDIMon and FileMon, have them all opened and windowed and double click an office document.

After doing this we found out that the Registry was going nuts due to JustZipIt integrating itself into every file extension, and it was the constant calls to the registry that were slowing it down. TDIMon showed us that, due to us switching our Intranet server over, there was a dead mapped drive to the old server - which reflects the valid point in an above post about checking mapped drives. TDIMon will show you any dead connections. Once we removed the dead link and JustZipIt's masses of registry files, the problem was solved.

Any results that show "NOT FOUND" when running any of the monitoring programs indicate a problem, and if things start going ballistic when you double click the document that also indicates a problem.

Good luck,

Mako.

[Number6]

Hi, first post so here goes.

We had a similar problem in our school. All office documents would take literally minutes to open when double clicked, but were fine when opened from within the program. We found out that it was due to a zipping program we had installed, called JustZipIt (do NOT use this, ever!). The program created GUI commands attached to the windows shell, so when any document was right clicked you could "Just Zip It".

I would suggest you run ProcMon, RegMon, TDIMon and FileMon, have them all opened and windowed and double click an office document.

After doing this we found out that the Registry was going nuts due to JustZipIt integrating itself into every file extension, and it was the constant calls to the registry that were slowing it down. TDIMon showed us that, due to us switching our Intranet server over, there was a dead mapped drive to the old server - which reflects the valid point in an above post about checking mapped drives. TDIMon will show you any dead connections. Once we removed the dead link and JustZipIt's masses of registry files, the problem was solved.

Any results that show "NOT FOUND" when running any of the monitoring programs indicate a problem, and if things start going ballistic when you double click the document that also indicates a problem.

Good luck,

Mako.

Good ideas there.

I'm onsite tomorrow so I'll have a look with these tools.

Thanks

[Number6]

We found the cause, but not a solution yet.

It seems that it is indeed the database client software that's causing the issue. We uninstalled it from one machine and office docs reverted to behaving properly. Tech support for the database have no idea at this stage but have promised us they'll look into it.

In the meantime the users will have to live with the issue, it's not so bad because opening documents directly from an Office app is fine, it's only double clicking a file within Explorer that produces the error.

Thanks for all the suggestions.