Office files taking 30sec-1min to open on XP clients from Windows 2000 DC share. Started small, now over 500 pcs affected!!

update 2: I have noticed that if i open winword.exe or excel.exe and then from there do a open of the file, it opens instantly. This happens to both local and networked files. Upon closing word and then double clicking the word file itself, its back to 30sec-1min delays. ahhhh!!!!!

update 3: oh lordy. ok, so I have now deteremined that if i unplug the NIC the files open just fine. Plug the nic in and we're back to delay.

Something simple to start with...Are any of the clients showing any disconnected mapped drives? If so, remove them, as it causes Office to hang. Also, any addins that were pushed out to them that could be failing?

johnb6767: no, no d/c'd mapped drives. No addins to speak of. As I stated, the problem goes away when the nic isn't connected, so theres a connection between the two somewhere.

no the t1's are point-to-points from our stores to our main office. so they're just on different subnets, and in different sites AD-wise. no dns changes or problems. all things still resolve fine. Tomorrow im going to do a capture on the client nic, see if theres something going on there.

SOLUTION:

This turned out to be related to a MS initiated audit. We were recently audited by ms, and in the proccess of that audit utilized a piece of software from Express Metrix (EM). This software deserves is own ridiculous thread, and cost our company many, many man-hours to setup and use. Needless to say, we used the software for 30days (Trial) and completed the audit within that timeframe. Their software is client/server based, with a SQL database on the server, and pushing out to clients via WMI and AD. The server itself is used for nothing other than this (part of the problem, I'll get to that later). So, 1 week after the audit, and probably 2 weeks since anyone thought of the server, the current office problem creeps up. Since the EM client is installed without leaving a noticeable footprint on the client (unless you dig into the sysroot dir and look for it specifically), we at first missed this correlation. Turns out that on the 16th the EM Server rebooted (probably from a windows update) and at somepoint the floppy drive had died. This left it setting at a BIOS 'f1 to continue' prompt. Now, this 'server' (nothing more than a crappy desktop formatted for the purpose) isn't production, and the only software on it has expired, so its lack of network presence wasn't felt. However, each time you attempt to open a office doc, the express client attempts to contact the server with usage data. Since the server is down, it times out. No where along the lines did these guys ever bother to include any form of error reporting in there software, so no log/event was generated. No message was displayed, not even a beep from the PC speaker.

So, this 'non-intrusive,' 'absolutely easy to use,' 'save countless manhours,' software has cost us a fortune in lost productivity, and not to mention it did an INCREDIBLY poor job of actually inventorying. Oh ya, and then after it completely misreported our environment to MS, it was on us (guilty until proven innocent) to prove that we weren't using the software it reported. And by prove, i mean visit almost 500 pcs and take screen shots of 'add/remove programs.' But like I said, that is a compeletly different thread.


So, if your office apps have taken a huge turn for the worse, and you've been trying to inventory your environment, just shoot yourself. I wish i had weeks ago.

Thats crazy......But why are you accepting an answer? You can always close a question on your own if no answer was provided.