Office Applications Not Opening On Student Machines

[SJ98]

Hello,

 

We have had this issue in our Academy where students will try to load work through Word, and if you go to task manager, you can see that Word is open as a background process, but it takes forever to actually load. I have sat with a machine before where it has taken 20+ minutes just to load a 20KB word document. Is there any way I can fix this where it'll work instantly everytime? There were a few things saying it could be something to do with Appdata, as we have roaming profiles, but we thought we had sorted this when we made a GPO to redirect roaming appdata to C:\Appdata.

 

Not sure if anyone else has had an issue like this and knows a fix for it?

 

Thanks,

Sam

[psydii]

use Promon and see what is going on?

 

20 minutes is a long long time. I can't even begin to speculate what might be causes that delay on a repeatable basis (as a one off, it might be an update pending?). Typically delays are caused by plugins, or the anti-malware protection system stalling but 20 minutes is longer than anything I have ever heard of. Other things are redirected AppData folders (as you have mentioned), and also web filtering getting in the way. Perhaps try fiddler if procmon does not point to anything immediately obvious.

[robintech]

if it works as a local account will narrow it down a bit

[SJ98]

Hi psydii,

 

I have never used Procmon before - I have it open now - I assume should I be looking for winword or something relating to word?

 

Thanks,

Sam

[psydii]

Hi psydii,

 

I have never used Procmon before - I have it open now - I assume should I be looking for winword or something relating to word?

 

Thanks,

Sam

 

Yes. Here is a video on how to use procmon: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/defrag-tools/3-process-monitor

 

Also chatgpt / MS Copilot comes up with a pretty good set of guidance if you feed it the problem you are having along with "how to I use procmon to help find the root cause of this issue"

[SJ98]

Hi ittech,

 

So it works when I log in, but not for a student. We have students doing assessments and their word document doesn't load, but then if I log them out and then I try word, it comes on.

[Miscbrah]

Sounds like misery for sure! What version of Office?

[SJ98]

Hello Miscbrah,

 

I believe it is 2019