Office 2013 sluggish and display problems

[DragonReborn]

I have an intermittent problem with my custom PC that seems centered around office 2013. After awhile, each office 2013 "instance" (outlook or excel window) becomes EXTREMELY sluggish. As in I can barely drag the window around. The top nav bar (with file, home, minimize, close etc) turns completely white. If i close all windows and open them again it seems to work again for a bit.

I also have notice the nav bar of Firefox disappearing again as well.

I have noticed that it ALWAYS happens when the monitors have been turned back on after inactivity. i have set my computer never to "sleep" or "hibernate" so i believe it's just the monitors going to sleep.

I have updated to the latest windows and video drivers (I'm running Windows 8.1).

Things I have tried:

1. updated to latest drivers/updates for windows and Office
2. reinstalled office
3. disabled "hardware acceleration" in office apps (no effect)
4. posted on anandtech forums so smarter people could help me =)

any ideas? thanks!

 

[DragonReborn]

no ideas?

 

[jkauff]

My guess is the monitor thing is just a coincidence, and that something is happening in the background during the period of inactivity. I had a similar problem, and the culprit turned out to be a badly programmed background process that was set to check for updates online during idle periods. It couldn't connect to its website for some reason, but kept trying, bogging down the whole system.

Use Task Manager to see what's running in the background the next time things slow down. There may be a clue in the Startup tab, or if you're unlucky it's something set up to run as a Windows Task based on a certain trigger. Unfortunately there are a lot of legitimate systems tasks set up to run that way, so you may have trouble finding the culprit in the list of scheduled tasks.

I had to do a clean install of Win 8, get all the updates, download the 8.1 update, and then re-install applications one by one (I created a restore point before adding each application) before I found the problem app. Hopefully you won't need to go that far. Sometimes, though, even uninstalling the app doesn't get rid of leftover background processes, so you're in for a lot of trial and error if you can't find the answer in Task Manager.