W11 and Office - Strange Behaviour when away from Domain

[icttech1981]

Currently working our way through upgrading all our machines to Windows 11. We started 6 months ago as we have almost 150 machines onsite............nice of Microsoft to now decide to offer another year of Windows 10 updates for free just weeks before the initial cut off point 😬

 

One strange issue has come to light though which we are struggling to get to the bottom of.

 

We use offline files and have done for years with no problems. When teachers work in school on our domain we have no issues with Office 2016. The same applies when the laptops are used away from school and not connected to any WIFI network. However, once you take a laptop home and connect it to any network with an internet connection Microsoft Word hangs really badly, usually it opens the first file fine but any extras you ask it to open it takes an age to do (Anything up to 3 minutes) or it crashes and closes. Powerpoint and PDF's (Many of which are substantially larger than the Word files) all open fine and very quickly. The machine that first had the issue is a good spec too, a Dell Latitude with a 500GB SSD, i7 and 16GB RAM.

 

We have tried all manner of fixes such as:

Disabling all add-ons

Running Word as administrator

Opening word files from USB drives

Opening word files from the C drive

Trying multiple versions of (old!) Office

Working through event viewer to find any issues that may be obvious

Running Wireshark and working our way through the logs

Re-installing Windows 11

 

None of the above worked. We have a few machines still on Windows 10 so we tested this on a separate WIFI network away from school, Word functions fine and the files open as you would expect!

Any help is much appreciated.

 

Edited October 2, 2025 by icttech1981

[bknaggs]

Is it looking for a template/default save location/something on a network location it can't reach? Have you tried or can you try off site but with a VPN connection back?

[icttech1981]

12 minutes ago, bknaggs said:

Is it looking for a template/default save location/something on a network location it can't reach? Have you tried or can you try off site but with a VPN connection back?

 

Thanks for the quick reply.

I changed the default save location to H:\ (That's the letter we use for users home drives) and that made no difference. I also checked the templates and these are all in the appdata on the C drive, they aren't looking for any network path.

 

We don't have a VPN to connect to school offsite either

[3s-gtech]

Does it do it on newer versions of Office? I ask because Office 2016 goes EoL on the 14th of this month too, and no extended support for that.

[icttech1981]

1 hour ago, 3s-gtech said:

Does it do it on newer versions of Office? I ask because Office 2016 goes EoL on the 14th of this month too, and no extended support for that.

 

2016 is the newest version we have. We understand that it's EOL soon but our funding is been massively reduced over the next few years so we're hoping to avoid extra expense. Completely get that no new security patches will be released but by moving to W11 our machines OS is at least fully patched and secure.

 

We do get the free version of Word through our A1 licence...we may have to look into using one drive instead of offline files if we can't work out a fix for this problem. The most annoying aspect of it is that it's only Word that's causing issues. All the other Office programs work great! 

[Bedders]

We have had a similar issue with Roaming Profiles when we migrated them to a new server years ago; Word had some AutoRecover records pointing to the old location, so when we switched the server off, DNS timeouts meant Word hung/crashed on loading. 

[icttech1981]

1 hour ago, Bedders said:

We have had a similar issue with Roaming Profiles when we migrated them to a new server years ago; Word had some AutoRecover records pointing to the old location, so when we switched the server off, DNS timeouts meant Word hung/crashed on loading. 

 

That sounds promising, can you remember where the autorecover records are stored and how you fixed the issue?

[Bedders]

We haven't. I've left the old server on, only accessible from that VLAN, with no file shares active..... It's on my to do list 🤣

 

Sorry!

[icttech1981]

An update on this, we finally found the issue!

 

When opening Word and connected to a different network other than school, I noticed that at the bottom of the Word intro box it sometimes showed the text 'searching for printer' (Not always though!). I set the default printer to something other than the copiers we use in school and Word began behaving again!

 

It seems when connected to a network away from school it spends a while looking for the copiers in school to help setup print settings / page layouts etc. 

 

It's take a while to get to the bottom of this but its another fix added to my OneNote catalogue. It must be WIndows 11 related though as I tried to replicate the issues on a W10 machine and all worked fine, even with the default printer been set to the copiers we have in school.