documents take two minutes to open from My Documents

[adakeep]

When trying to open a Word Doc or Excel or any other office doc from the My
Documents folder it takes two minutes for the document to open.

Running Windows XP Home, sp2 all updates, Office xp with all updates no add
ins.
When opening a doc by double clicking within the My Document folder it takes
two minutes to open but does finally open. If I open, for example Word or
Excel and then file - open a doc from the My Documents folder it opens
immediately. I also discovered that if I move all the Office docs out of the
My Documents and into another folder, or a new folder and then try to open
the doc from the new folder it opens immediately. Put the doc back into the
My Documents folder and it takes two minutes.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled office, no change in problem. I am
stumped. Suggestions?

 

[Guy]

First off, run Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter, if you can.

There are several possibilities, all related to your computer's
performance. Four that quickly come to mind are --

1. Office / Win XP is pre-fetching too much information as it tries to
anticipate what you will want to open next. If you have a lot of files
in My Documents....

2. You have too many processes running. For XP Home / Pro I try to
keep this number at 30 or below.

3. Your computer is downloading software updates in the background
while you try to work. Last week (April 17-20) was a real PITA as MS
and Java both sent out big updates. Re-installing office may have
contributed to this problem since it might have tried downloading
updates as well.

4. Your C: drive is full, forcing your cache file to work overtime.

All of these issues have solutions. What are your computer's specs --
CPU, RAM, video -- and how many processes are running?

If you do not already have system cleaner apps, download something
like CCleaner (Google it), install and run it.

If you need steps on how to change your pre-fetch settings, defrag
your hard drive, etc... someone on this board will surely send that
information to you.