Windows XP problem slow LOCAL file open

[jthiessen]

I have found that this is for sure a Windows XP problem. I have some documents that open slowly on a brand new P4 3Ghz 512Mb RAM. These are local files, mostly in Word XP (2002). The interesting thing is that on a Windows 2000 system, the document opens right away, but on Windows XP, there is a 20-30 second delay.
All affected files seem to have a significant amount of formatting, so I thought the issue may be hardware related, until I tried opening the same files on a slower Windows 2000 machine and had them open instantly.
It seems to me that either Windows XP is not indexing certain formatting or something like that, but I am at a loss.

Any ideas?

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[kippy13]

Have you tried installing the latest service packs and hotfixes for Office and XP?

"Sometimes I do not know but I try hard"- R.F. Haughty 1923

 

[jthiessen]

All service packs and updates are installed. To no effect.

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[kippy13]

I hate to ask such a silly question but are you sure that the documents are on the local machine and not on a network?
Are all the documents word and what size range would they be in?
I have seen slow performance opening documents over a network but never(until now) on a local machine.
Were the documents that are slow to open created in an earlier version? Check the Templates
and Add-Ins to see if the documents references a template that no
longer exists. It could make all the difference to set one that does!


"Sometimes I do not know but I try hard"- R.F. Haughty 1923

 

[jthiessen]

The document is for sure local. As far as the template goes, it may very well be opening a template that does not exist on the affected machine. MOST documents open fine, but the issue still remains that on a Win2k pro machine, it opens instantly.

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[kippy13]

Perhaps these templates or addins are on the 2k machine which is why it opens quicker.Sorry I dont think I am going to be able to help you with this one. Hopefully someone else will come along with a solution.

"Sometimes I do not know but I try hard"- R.F. Haughty 1923

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
Are there any drives mapped to network locations?
If they cannot be found, it may take a long time for any file to open, even if not on one of those drives.

XP ( Other versions, like 2000 as well) appears to want to verify all the known drives whenever it needs to access any one of them.

Just a thought...

 

[jthiessen]

There is a mapped drive, but it is accessible. Thanks for the suggestion though. It is the IT manager's computer that is affected and you can be sure that I am hearing comments now about how this should be an easy problem for me to solve......

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[newnetadmin]

I am having the same problem with several users (only the ones on XP)on my network. It is also happening to mine. Local or not the files are from word and excel. I did notice that they all say "Requesting virus scan" at the bottom of the application window. I don't know if this is a new virus or problem with XP or NAV 2003 which is what I have installed. All the computers that have this problem are Win XP Pro, Office 2000 Pro and all have Norton AV 2003. If anyone knows how to fix please help.

jthiessen: are you running NAV on yours?

Al

 

[jthiessen]

I am running SAV Corporate 8.1...the corporate version of NAV, however, I tried uninstalling the AV client and I still had the problem.

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[kippy13]

Hi guys,
I think things have become a bit blurred here as network drives are now being mentioned.
If you do a google "Slow network drives in XP" in google groups youll find many comments and suggestions on what the issue is and possible work arounds. May be worth checking out.
However from what you say the issue is with local files which leaves me stumped!

"Sometimes I do not know but I try hard"- R.F. Haughty 1923

 

[joebloeonthego]

if this just started recently try going into IE options, advanced, and uncheck 'check for publisher's certificate revocation' or something like that.
It's some issue with verisign apparently, and odds are you have Norton autoprotect running, which is why it's happening when you move/copy files and use word etc.
good luck!

 

[jthiessen]

RESOLVED! This issue was caused by the color printer on the network. Word captures the printer everytime you open a document, so I mapped the printer to a tcp/ip port locally on the machine instead of going across the network for printing. Problem solved.

Josh

MCSE, CCNA, MCT, MCP

 

[Bl0x]

are they running different versions of office

 

[Hurc]

We had the same problem start on our small office network on Wednesday. It was first noticed around 9:30 pm that evening (EST).

Our software is fairly old, an NT server, Office 2000 running on 3 Windows 98 and 2 XP desktops. All the desktops exhibit this problem. When you turn off the Office plug-in in NAV 2003, the problem goes away of course. I have also noticed that when you go to open NAV on these desktops, it too takes a long time.

I re-installed NAV on one desktop but that did not solve the problem. Several virus scans yielded nothing. I will look into Josh's printer solution.

 

[bcastner]

The problem is due to the expiration of the Verisign intermediate certificate on your machine. See:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/08/1849245&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=128&tid=172&tid=95

Look for my yellow light bulb post on this page for information on how to update your Verisign certificate.

 

[Hurc]

Thanks bcastner. I am heading in to work tomorrow to fix this. If it works, I will be a hero again for a week.

Tom

 

[ProgRocker]

This looks a lot like the problem I've been having the past few days on my home machine (not networked). Running XP pro and Office 2000 SB and Norton AV 2003 on a 950MHz Athlon with 768MB RAM. I hadn't made any major changes or reconfigs around this time. The symptoms only occur when I'm logged on my dialup internet. When offline, no problems.

The slowness occurs when I try to launch Word or Excel, taking about 30-60 sec to load. It also does it when I try to open any document in those programs, regardless of the size. While loading, I see the "requesting virus scan" message at the bottom of the screen. The tray icon for my dialup connection is lit up, showing data transfer while this is occurring, which I find a bit unnerving. What's being sent or received? I ran Norton, but no virii. I also swept for spyware/adware, but nothing. I haven't checked for XP updates in a few weeks, but haven't seen any of the nag screens for that pop up either.

In addition, it's sometimes very slow when I right-click (but not left-click) the Start button, slow again when I launch Windows Explorer, and also when I try to cut/paste or delete files in Windows Explorer. Again, this only occurs when I'm online.

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. All the info I'm finding online seems to be directed to networked machines.

Cheers.

 

[bcastner]

See my "lightbulb" notice: thread779-746272 and the "fix" for the issue thread608-746263

 

[AccessUser22]

I just noticed a similar problem with some work that I'm doing on Access 2000 databases.

We have a split Access 2000 database, who's front end is connected to two seperate Access 2000 back ends (i.e., half the tables are in one database, half are in another). We have no performance issues when setting this up on a machine that uses the Windows 2000 operating system. However, we have installed the application on two or three machines using Windows XP and all of these machines have demonstrated a considerable slowdown in performance. For example, a form that used to open in 3 seconds, now takes 30, or if someone else is accessing the same form, the form takes a full minute to open. I'm wondering if this is truely an operating system issue, or if anyone else has experienced similar problems like this. Does anyone know of any information that's available on the issue or have any ideas how I can solve this? I've been searching on the microsoft.com website and haven't been able to find information yet.
I'm going to look into the verisign root certificates and see if that is the problem, but I was wondering if anyone had any other ideas as to what might be going on?
Any response would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!