I'm at a site in a large company network running on Windows 2003 & Active Directory. We have a handful of users that experience extreme slowness when opening, closing or working with a subset of Excel 2003 files. Their systems literally crawl, e.g. 20 minutes to open/save a 1.2mb file, basic actions such as switching from sheet A to sheet B, inserting a row or editing a cell, in file can take 1-4 minutes (or much more). The issue isn't system capability. Each system tested is more than capable. It appears to be a networking issue or scan of some sort because we can mostly "fix it" just by pulling the network cable.
BACKGROUND
- Seems to relate to Excel files that have been around for a while, e.g. may have been Lotus 1-2-3 files that were converted, that sort of thing (not sure if this is relevant but was one of the areas we've focused on)
- The general belief is that the files each had links to external Excel files, or still do (not sure if this is relevant but was one of the areas we've focused on)
- Only occurs severely when in the office environment WHEN CONNECTED to the network (but doesn't matter if user loads from C drive or network -- when connected to network it experiences the slowing issue)
- Same file opened by different users can have different result, e.g. one staff member can open a problem file (sometimes) without the issues but the core affected users consistently have issues.
- Doesn't matter whether connected via VPN or LAN, issue is present if connected to the network while working in Excel
- Most of the problem files are large but not gigantic, e.g. 1.2mb, 15 tabs. One problem file is only about 200K
- Weve seen this on several machine types including new machine with ample capability (new Thinkpad T400, Windows XP patched current, 3GB RAM, 7200RPM/250GB hard drive with 150GB free).
- We've seen the issue migrate with user from T42 to T60 and from T42 to T400
- Reimaging hasn't helped
- New machine hasn't helped& one user has had four machines as we've attempted different approaches to a fix from reimaging, to upgraded model
- Files work fine in testing on personal PC so it appears to be the combination of our images, our network environment and these files
PARTIAL SOLUTION JUST DISCOVERED
- Performance generally improves to near normal immediately after disconnecting the machine from all networks (LAN/VPN/Wireless) and goes back to very poor when reconnected to any of these. We could demonstrate this in real time -- making it perform poorly or properly just by pulling the network connection, putting it back in, pulling it, etc. This suggests to me there is some undesirable scan or search occurring across the network that we kill by disconnecting.
- Disconnecting the network helped on another machine when working with an affected file. Performance was near normal. But, file saves were still surprisingly slow. On office machine a save on a 1.2MB file to C drive, with LAN DISCONNECTED, took 45 seconds. User actually viewed that as a great improvement and tolerable despite a personal laptop test taking only 5 seconds to do the same. The reason colleague thought that was an improvement is that while connected to LAN a save of same file took more than 20 minutes on average. On same file with LAN disconnected working in the file was near-normal performance -- acceptable -- notwithstanding the relatively long open and save times even from C drive.
I did look around expert exchange and other ares. Recommendations seem to focus on printers, spooler service, etc. I will try those but need to keep this active so posting about my particular case. Suggestions?
