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Windows Explorer open office files slow

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5 replies

by kin_mche

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Hi,

We got an isolated problem of one Windows XP SP2 when opening office files, pdf, etc. through Windows Explorer is very slow... almost frozen for 30 seconds. But if the same file .DOC was to be open with MS Word through the open dialog box, it's immediate. This goes for Excel, Word, PDF so far I checked. It looks like a Windows Explorer issue. I did a Windows update to no luck.

Any ideas, thanks.

5 replies

by jiminpa

Do you have your anti virus configured on that PC to scan all files before they open? Have you tried to launch Task Manager before you open the file to see if it is maxing out the CPU and or memory and which process is the culprit? That is where I would begin my search.

by kin_mche

I checked my AV and it's not scanning all files on open. I also looked at Task Manager and CPU/memory usage is fine, no spikes. I'll keep looking for answers, any ideas are welcome.

by thumbsup2

When you open a file from Explorer, the system has to first, search for what program opens that type of file, then second, actually start an occurrance of the program. If the hard drive has been compressed to save space, the system must decompress the EXE file before it can start it. If the hard drive is fragmented, it can effect how long the program takes to fire up.

When you have the program already open, there's no need to do those tasks and thus it will appear as if the file opens quicker because 90% of the tasks have already been completed. However, I'll bet that if you actually timed how long it takes to start the program from Explorer vs how long it takes to start the program from a shortcut/menu, you'll find that it takes just as long either way to actually start the program, not counting opening the file.

by kin_mche

We recently changed the name of our file server. Solution was to delete all registry entries pointing to our old server name on the machine in question. This only affected a few users.

Thanks

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