Word documents very slow to open over network, but fine when opened locally - on one machine

Question

Windows XP, Word 2003, patched.

The issue is happening with several Word documents stored on a network drive.

The Word documents are clearly a bit wonky (i.e. one is 675k, but if you copy everything but the last paragraph marker into a new document, the new document is only 30k). But that's only part of the problem.

On one weird machine, and one machine only, it takes ~20 seconds to open these Word documents from the network drive.

• Copy the file to C: on that werid machine? Opens immediately.

• Go to other machines (that are very similar - same patch level, etc.) and open the same document from the network? Opens immediately.

• Delete normal.dot? 20 seconds.

• Login with a different user on the weird machine? 20 seconds.

• Plug wonky machine into a different network port? 20 seconds.

So the problem appears to be hardware related (i.e. wonky internal NIC) or related to a setting that is not profile specific.

Any ideas?

"Scrubbing" all the documents isn't ideal for several reasons.

This is driving me nuts because I swear I ran into this before many years ago and eventually figured it out. But I appear to have lost my notes.

Answer 1

Uninstall the Office File Validation update

Answer 2

If you are comfortable going a bit lower level, you might try two different tools:

Process Monitor. This will let you see what Word is doing for those 20 seconds. It might spit out a function call with a reasonable name that would tell you what is going on.

WireShark. You could try using WireShark to figure out what the machine is doing on the network for 20 seconds.

Both of these tools would be more useful if you are familar with Windows API calls or Windows file sharing network specifics, but even without that knowledge, some interesting pattern might show up that would point you in the right direction.

Answer 3

Uninstalling Office File Validation Tool works, especially I am using Office 2003, but the tool is for 2010. After uninstallation, time required for opening a 1xxKB word document from network drive reduced from 2xx seconds to 1 second! Thanks for your advice!

My other colleagues also got problem solved with same solution.