Office 2003 applications take long time to load, especially attachments.

[Spazz]

Hi,

I currently have a problem where a number of users are experiencing
very slow load times when opening office applications, especially files
sent from emails. During the day it will work normally, and then
suddenly everything goes south. Going from "good" to "bad"
appears to be completely random. The closest thing I can relate it to
is that when some emails come in, with attachments, that seems to
trigger everything off. The "slowness" doesn't seem to matter
whether it's a local file or an email attachment (today it took over
1 minute to open a 68k word attachment). However once the period
clears, everything (attachments and local files) open fine.

I have trolled through other posts and tried the suggestions I have
found. Disabling Symantec antivirus (I am using enterprise edition),
clearing temp files, adjusting outlook polling times etc. As suggested
on other posts I have also looked at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=823372, even though the version I am
using is later. I have also looked at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830561/, but none of the documents seem
to have any attached templates.

I am not sure where else to turn or what I am overlooking. Each client
is connecting to an exchange server (externally) using mapi connection,
but all email is being stored locally in PST files (political issue
with head office will not allow us to store the email on the exchange
server). With or without cached mode doesn't matter. One of the
clients has a couple of large PST files in use in their outlook setup,
but I don't see how it would affect opening local documents, and
furthermore, clients with relatively small PST files are having the
same issues.

At the moment I am only left to consider formatting the laptops, but i
am hesitant to do it because I really don't think it will fix the
problem and in due time it will likely come back.

Can anyone please offer some other solutions or ideas to point me in
some direction?
Greatly appreciated.

 

[FRUSTRATED TO THE BITTER END!!!]

you will need to have the users store their .pst files onto another server,
or back it up on cd. because those files are being stored locally, it will
take up the speed of how fast the application is opening. another thing is,
they may also need to be defragmented, and the temporary file folder emptied
along with the temporary internet file folder.

all the temp files can and will slow the computer down to a crawl.

Hope that helped.