Microsoft Office 2003 Clipart Really SLOW!!!

[BKGarry]

Hello everyone,

 

We have had office 2003 here for about a year now but there is one problem I cannot seem to solve. No matter how fast the machine is or what the office setting are the clip art gallery and organiser are sooooooo slow it takes about 5 mins of what looks like a frozen program for it to load.

 

I have Office fully installed (except for the document image writing tools) on the local HDD but I cannot seem to find any reason for this.

 

Does anyone experience this or has solved it?

 

Gaz

[Irazmus]

You're not alone, we have that same problem here. Sometimes clipart works perfectly, sometimes it takes an age.

 

It seems that since I rebuilt the user accounts and gave the kids non-mandatory profiles, we havn't seen the problem reoccur (or maybe people just stopped reporting it ^^; ), but I've not properly tested it yet, and probably won't until I've reimaged to a standard setup in the summer.

 

For the time being we seem to have settled on "Don't use clipart", which I'll admit isn't an optimal solution, but it works for now and no-one seems to mind too much.

[BKGarry]

You gave you kids non-man profiles :-O. What are the main advantages and disadvantage of that

[Dos_Box]

Mandatory profiles are an NT 4.0 era method. AD Provides just as good configuration options. I've never used them and never had any problems. But the whole profile debate is one way to spark off an argument here. I suspect many have them as a legacy thing and have never got around to dropping them. Anyway, I digress....

 

I just setup a default user profile (non-mandatory) and let AD do the rest.

[Geoff]

You can use mandatory profiles if you want. There's nothing stopping you doing so. It works fine under XP (Its how I do things if I'm using a Samba domain controller).

 

Using all the bells and whistles in AD gives you more flexibility of course. It just depends if you need that flexibility or not.

 

There's pros and cons to each approach. I don't think you can catagorgically state one is better than the other. It depends on the situation.

[MrDylan]

Our Office Clipart was slow because it tries to search the internet.

 

I installed the Office ADM template and disabled the Internet Search function for the students.

 

I then copied the XP Media Content CD onto a server and ran a file which tells office to look at that for clipart, not for locally installed clip art.

 

Seems to work ok, let me know if you want any more details.

[Irazmus]

You gave you kids non-man profiles :-O. What are the main advantages and disadvantage of that

 

They're fully locked down in AD so they still can't do anything they're not supposed to. Personally I feel non-man is a more flexible and future-proof approach, but that's really just a matter of personal preference.

 

@MrDylan: I'll have to give that a try at some point, I've been meaning to have a look through the office ADM templates, this is as good a reason as any ^^

[Guest]

I then copied the XP Media Content CD onto a server and ran a file which tells office to look at that for clipart, not for locally installed clip art.

 

@MrDylan Looking to do the same at a school which had office setup without clipart. Whats the file you used?

[MrDylan]

All you have to do is run this line on the workstations.

 

msiexec.exe /i \\SERVERNAME\OfficeClipArt\CAG.MSI ADDSOURCE=ALL /qb

 

The only problem I had was that I needed to run it when I was logged in, pupils didn't have the permissions.

 

The important bits of that line are the location (obviously) and the ADDSOURCE bit. That just makes it access the clipart from that location, if you changed it to ADDLOCAL I believe it will copy the clipart to the local machine.

 

Info found here : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897754/EN-US/

[E1uSiV3]

You should be able to deploy that using AD with a transform im guessing, saves the hassle of running it manually

[Geoff]

Or just alter the MSI with orca.

[MrDylan]

I didn't know how to get it to work through deployment, was easy enough just having it run when i logged in and going round a room.

[Guest]

Cheers MrDylan works a treat

[MrDylan]

thankyou, glad I've helped someone! I've had quite a productive day, very strange.

[john]

The freezing is a big thing when searching for Clips Online via Office, I have posters around and staff have been trained to go to clip art, then tell it that you don't want it to search in Web Collections, just the other two and then no more crashes and freezing. If you want Clips online, use the big button at the bottom that says Clips Online

[MrDylan]

John, you can disable it using the Office ADM, find the option here:

 

User Configuration | Administrative Templates | Microsoft Clip Organizer and set the Hide Web Collections option to Enabled.

[john]

I could, but I am to lazy to do it Its sad I know, but maybe at summer I will do it when I have time to do it

[Andie]

Very helpful information here. But I am still having problems.

 

I have copied the Office XP Media CD to a network share that all users can read. I have run the command line as administrator on the client. As administrator, I can now find lots of clipart without going online. So far, so good.

 

But when I log in as an ordinary user, I can't find any clipart beyond the basic Office 2003 set. It still doesn't seem to be looking at the collections in the network share. Is this a permissions issue on the share or is it mandatory profiles causing this?????

[Andie]

OK, I've installed using the ADDLOCAL option instead and that appears to have fixed things for all users. Maybe a permissions thing then...??

[rpycroft]

Hi all, at our place I've just added http://office.microsoft.com/clipart/ into everyones favourites via group policy and told them to look there whenever they need clipart that's not in the normal (local) clipart folder. Does anyone else do this or am I a lazy tech?

 

Richard.

[Joanne]

hah.. i just tell the kids to go to the website... i don't give them a link!!

[rpycroft]

Thought about that! Just thought to save getting mithered all the time I'd add it to favourites with Group Policy... pretty easy to do and saves loads of time. Just the way I likes it...

[Andie]

The problem we had was that when a whole class was looking for clip art, and thus going online, our Internet connection had a nervous breakdown and two or three machines would just appear to hang. If we just disabled web searching for clip art, then nobody found any clip art because Office 2003 doesn't come with very much as standard.

 

Anyway, I've fixed it thanks to all the information here. Have installed the Office XP media CD locally to clients, as it was quicker than fiddling with permissions! Found the relevant ADM template and addded it to our Office 2003 GPO, enabled Hide Web Collections (and ticked the box in the settings) and we are all sorted.

 

Thanks folks!

[FN-GM]

Mandatory profiles are an NT 4.0 era method. AD Provides just as good configuration options. I've never used them and never had any problems. But the whole profile debate is one way to spark off an argument here. I suspect many have them as a legacy thing and have never got around to dropping them. Anyway, I digress....

 

I just setup a default user profile (non-mandatory) and let AD do the rest.

 

Same here Dos_Box

[boomam]

Where is this 'hide web collections' bit in the ADM?

I cant find it, the nearest ive found is the one located here:

admin templates

MS Office 2003

Tools|Options|General|Service Options

Online Content

Online Content Options (disabled).