Print Spooler causing super slow Office Word/Excel opening?

Hello,

We have a very wierd issue going on with a previously fine working WIndows XP Pro SP2 machine. This system is having a particular problem in which Microsoft Office Word/Excel files are opening very slowly when either opened as an attachment or directly off the desktop or folder. THis problem started occuring just about a week ago and we do not know what has caused this. Since a system restore did not fix the issue, it is not software related. Here is the long list of things I tried to fix this:

Changed network cards (from Intel to 3COM), upgraded to Office 2003 SP3, System Restored to 3 weeks earlier, reinstalled both network printers with latest HP drivers, tried the normal.dot fix for slow Word opening, tried to split the network connection from wall jack into a switch and connected desktop directly to switch, turned off macro security in Word/Excel, Turned off AV scanning in real time, Updated all of Windows and Office (both XP and 2003 versions tried).

What I found which has pretty much allowed me to square this issue down is by using FileMOn from Microsoft. THis program allowed me to check what queries each program was making during its operation. So I recorded with FileMOn what WinWord and Excel were calling during their execution and found that SPOOLSV.exe was what each was trying to call about 5 times in a row before opening.

This as we know is the print spooler service. SO I went ahead and turned this service off and tried to launch documents from the desktop and outlook and it worked JUST FINE! Turning print spooler back on brings back the issue.

Does anyone know what could be causing this? We had an IBM laptop with a very similar issue (T60) back in May do this in the same office but we ended up working through IBM to get an entirely different model sent and the problem went away. This time we cant just recommend a replacement as the machine has been working fine for years and truly works great besides this print spooling issue.

THe printers we have on the network, if you are wondering, are:

HP LASERJET 4200N (using internal JetDirect)
HP LASERJET COLOR 4650 (using internal JetDirect)
HP Laserjet ??? (1990's model, very large, using external JetDirect Print Server via Parallel)

Let me know of any possible fixes you may have.

NOTE: We have already decided to try placing shortcuts on the shortcut for starting and stopping the print spooler when needed.