Office 2007 slow displaying folders contents

[Aquila76]

System Specs: Windows XP SP2 & Office 2007; P4 2.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD

I have one PC at work with an odd problem. All the Office 2007 apps launch fine, editing and printing are fine, too. However, trying to view the contents of a folder in Word, Excel, etc. (either locally or on the network) is slow. By 'view the contents' I mean clicking on the Office button, clicking 'Open', and then waiting while it retrieves the contents of a folder. The more items are in a folder, the longer it takes. Once the files are present in the Open dialog box, it opens the doc (Word, Excel, etc. - any version from 97 - 2k7) right away and editing is fine. However, the same issue above happens when you try to 'Save' a new file or 'Save As...' the edited file.

It seems to scale with the amount of items (folders, docs, whatever) that are in the folder. The PC's 'My Documents' folder only has about 10 items, but takes roughly 10 seconds to display its contents. Our main folder on the network has all our open caseload in it, with about 5000 folders, and takes several minutes to display its content. All the other systems (same HW & SW) can display the contents near immediately. If I browse to the folders on that affected system using 'My Computer', the folders contents appear instantly. It's only browsing around with the Office 2007 apps that creates this issue.

I've tried:
1. Running Word & Excel in safe mode (stops all add-ons & macros), problem persists.
2. Disabled Autoselect, problem persists.
3. Disabled (and later uninstalled) MS Desktop Search. I read a couple articles where the indexing service used by this could cause similar problems (although it runs fine on the other systems); problem persists.
4. Repair of Office 2K7, problem persists.
5. Almost this.

Anyone else run into this issue?

 

[gsaldivar]

Just to confirm, you dont have problems browsing files from the "open file" dialog within other apps?

 

[Aquila76]

You know, I didn't think of trying that. The user only mentioned it in Office, though. He was running Acrobat and WMP fine. I'll check that in a couple hours.

 

[Aquila76]

OK, it's only Office that's doing this. Acrobat, Paint, IE7, etc. can all browse around folders just fine.

 

[gsaldivar]

Try opening task manager, sort by declining CPU%, and watch it closely while the system "reads" the items in the folders in Word/Excel's open file dialog.

Are there any processes that are approaching 100% while folder contents are retrieved?

Is "CISVC.EXE" listed in the task manager? If so, try killing this and see if it helps.

 

[gsaldivar]

I also found this procedure which you can try:

Go to the Control Panel, Folder Options, File Types. Highlight XLS
extension and then click Advanced. Click Open from the list, and then click
Edit. Add "%1" (quotes are needed) to the end of the Application used
string (which will be /e for the Excel XLS extension.) Also uncheck the DDE
box.

 

[gsaldivar]

Also check to see if there are any printers that the user has installed that are no longer needed. Delete any unnecessary printers from the Printer Control Panel, restart, and see if there is any improvement.

 

[gsaldivar]

Heres a few more procedures you can try:

START > CONTROL PANEL > Folder Options > View
Uncheck ?Automatically search for network printers and folders? > OK
Reboot.

Word:
Word Options > Advanced > Display
"Show this number of Recent Documents? set to zero.
Quit Word.

Excel:
Excel Options > Advanced > Display
"Show this number of Recent Documents? set to zero.
Quit Excel.

 

[Aquila76]

Thanks, gsaldivar; I'll try some of these out after lunch.

1. No CISVC.EXE process. The only thing pegging (only @ 20-30% though) was WINWORD.EXE (Word's exe).

2. I saw and tried that "%1" method, and it opens everything twice for some reason. I think that was more for Word Documents being slow to load or not opening.

3. Only two printers installed: networked HP4250n and Adobe PDF

4. The printers and folders map through a login script. All the other (functioning) systems connect them this way, too.
MRU settings had no effect.

 

[Aquila76]

Heh. Outlook 2007 does the same thing when browsing for an attachment. However, right clicking the file and choosing Send to > Mail Recipient works just as fast as the other machines.

It's almost like Office 2007's hook into Explorer is somehow globally busted. I assume it uses the host PC's explorer.exe to propagate the Open dialog box.

 

[gsaldivar]

Very wierd. Sorry I dont have any other ideas at the moment, but i'll take another look at it this evening.

 

[Aquila76]

One of the other techs decided to uninstall/reinstall Office 2007 on this system last night. It's STILL doing it and actually appears to have made the delay longer. I don't if he did a full uninstall or just ran the add/remove process. I know Office still leaves a load of directories & settings files in case you ever want to install office again. I think I'll uninstall it completely later on to see if that fixes it. Whatever's hosed is really hosed!

 

[Aquila76]

After trying everything I could find online, we ended up backing up this user's settings and reimaging the system. That fixed it. My condolences to anyone experiencing this issue.