Office files suddenly open extremely slow 1

[BoulderRidge]

I run Office 2000 (SP3) on Windows 2000 Pro (SP4) with Norton Anti-Virus 2002.

Opening any existing Office file (Access, Word, Excel) takes 30-45 seconds. This is new in the last two weeks and seems to coincide with a major attack of spyware I got when my kid used my PC to research a paper. He swears he didn't click Yes to download or install anything but I had popups and hijackers galore. I have run Ad-Aware Personal SE, Hijack This, and Spybot several times including in Administrator mode and it seems like I have gotten it pretty well cleaned up, although I'm no expert on the subject. I've also done a full virus scan with nothing found. But my files still open incredibly slow. I don't know what would suddenly cause these documents to crawl like that. If I just launch the program (Word, Excel) with no document it loads quickly.

I have disabled the Office plugin in Norton and checked that journalling is not enabled in Outlook.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

--BoulderRidge

 

[mscallisto]

Have you checked if your hard drive needs de-fragmenting?
Do you have lots of temporary files hanging around?

What operating system are you using?

 

[tf1]

Try the following:

First search your local drive for: officeav.dll
If you find it then go to Start/Run and run the following command:

regsvr32 /u "<path>\officeav.dll"

Regards: tf1

 

[BoulderRidge]

Just defragged my C: drive. Don't see much in any Temp folders I know to look in.

Ran the uninstall of officeav.dll successfully.

Rebooted and still took 45 seconds to open my 3-page Word document which lives in my Desktop folder. Similar performance with Access files in other locations too.

I am running Windows 2000 Pro. Have a 1.6 Ghz CPU, 256MB RAM, hard drive partitioned into two 40 GB drives.

No new software other than AdAware SE. Did go thru Add/Remove programs and removed a few suspicious entries in the process of cleaning up the junk. Could I have uninstalled something I shouldn't have? This machine went from moderate launch speeds (5-10 seconds to open a file) to this very annoying crawl "overnight."

Hope you guys love a challenge....thanks for your help!

--BoulderRidge B-)

 

[mscallisto]

You said you ran a full virus scan, plus the disk clean-up and still the same slow file open.

I have to ask what virus scan software you use and if it is up to date with the latest virus data file? It does sound like a memory virus problem.

One more thought is to start the task manager and see whats going on in the "processes tab" when you open a file.

 

[renyi]

i have the same problem but with windows 98 and office 97
i removed some spyware with spybot, checked for viruses, cleaned up my hard drive but nothing helped
help please!!!

 

[aquias]

Whelp,

In some research on this problem I've seen very few problems that cover the entire scope of the Office Suite. Two things to try...

First, go into whatever anti virus software you're currently using and disable any office or microsoft protection this has enabled and try to open some products and see what happens (Note, you probably want to be disconnected from the web when you do this).

Next up, I've also seen some similiar postings that after a nasty bout of spyware, Zone Alarm Pro actually starts to cause problems with Office. Do you have ZAP installed? If so, try disabling and see what happens.

Hopefully that'll give everyone a starting point

 

[renyi]

i had something like this running in the background "mshelp32", i turned it off and solved my problem

 

[BoulderRidge]

Very strange. I just downloaded an update to AdAware SE and ran it and cleaned up 40+ new critical objects. I had previously also reran Spybot and HijackThis with minimal fixes. But I just opened a Word doc and an Access file and they both opened instantly! Problem has been solved, at least for the moment!

I do not know for sure what fixed it, but two likely possibilities: I "fixed" a HijackThis entry for QuickTime that I had previously ignored and I ran AdAware SE with a new update for the first time.

FYI, I am using Norton AntiVirus 2002 with the most recent LiveUpdates and don't have any special Office scanning turned on. I didn't make any changes to Norton and didn't get any virus alerts between this morning when the files were slow and this afternoon when they are fast. THe only things that changed were the spyware scans noted above.

If the problem shows up again I will focus on the Adware possibility first...thanks to everyone for your great tips and links!

--BoulderRidge B-)

 

[jlockley]

Using a registry utility often helps, as well.

 

[tf1]

You need to update AdAware regularly (preferably at least weekly) and then select the Immunize tab and click on the Green Immunize command on the toolbar.

These dam hackers are as adept as virus writers at writing new spying utilities constantly to get around blockers.

Regards: tf1

 

[rdy4trvl]

Bolderridge - AdAware fixed my problem as well...and I do run it about once week....but it just needed to be run again. Thanks!