Microsoft Office 2013/2016 high CPU on RDS servers

[SEM15]

This may help some out there, although it's not an idea fix it may help someone until Microsoft release a fix or someone else comes up with a better option.

 

 

When opening a new or existing word document on any of the RDS servers and making some changes, leaving the mouse and keyboard without any additional input would result in a high CPU being used by the word application after some time ranging from 1 minute to 1 minute 40 seconds. This only occurs on Microsoft office 2013 and 2016, installing Microsoft office 2010 prevented the high CPU issues from occurring. Only after adding the role "RDS" in server manager would this occur for office 2013 and 2016, Moving the mouse or pressing any key would result in the high CPU usage dropping to normal CPU usage.

 

Disabling or enableing CPU fair sharing did not help the issue (including network and memory CPU fair sharing in the registry)

 

Disabling spelling, grammar or any proofing tools also did not help the issue.

 

Disabling the hardware acceleration in word also did not help the issue.

 

Using a local account on the server logged on via failover cluster also did not help this issue.

 

Removing the header and footer also did not help the issue

 

The server was running Windows server 2012 R2 standard, the same issue also occurs on Windows server 2016.

 

As observed in office 2010 the blinking cursor would not stop blinking but in office 2013 and 2016 the blinking cursor stopped after a while. With the fix (see below) the script seemed to activate the blinking cursor again after it had stopped, preventing the high CPU from occurring.

 

The temporary fix:

On each server a .VBS file has been placed in the start-up folder for all users, this script is set to "press" the scrolllook key on a loop waiting 1 minute between each press.

All users start-up is Located at "C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp"

 

The script for the .vbs File

 

//start

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

i = 0

Do While i = 0

WshShell.SendKeys "{Scrolllock}"

Wscript.Sleep (60000)

Loop

 

'With the help of

'https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/22860715/VBScript-Loop-Every-10-Minutes.html | Accepted Solution

'by:chandru_sol (https://www.experts-exchange.com/members/chandru_sol.html)

' and

'https://www.codeproject.com/tips/647828/press-any-key-automatically-usi

//end

 

sendkey.vbs

 

Sean