Slow load times for Office 2004

[Chris]

I have a complex issue here. I am an IT for a school district and we
are using Office 2004 throughout the district. At two schools we are
having issues with Office, mostly Word, loading very slowly(1-10
min). What makes tis complex is that we are using Open Directory for
user authentication and these users are the ones who are slow. If you
log on as a local machine user there is no problem. This is not
limited to a specific machine type, since I have this issue on 600 MHz
iMac's, 1.25 GHz eMac's and 2.0 GHz Intel iMac's. All of the machines
are running 10.4.8, and have all of the Office updates installed.
Here is a list of things I have tried to fix the slow load issue

1. Repair Permissions, repair disk, and reset PRAM.
2. Delete Office and all prefs both system and local user.
3. Removed the DoFonts file located in the /Applications/Microsoft
Office 2004/Office/ folder.
4. Removed all fonts from Office, and most fonts from the /Library/
Fonts folder.
5. Tried a delete/reinstall of Office again with only Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint, no other helper apps or dictionaries or anything. Just
basic programs.
6. Sadly I even tried to call Microsoft as a last resort. Of course
they were no help, because of the way we bought the app we have no
tech support for it. At least all it cost me was an hour on the
phone.

I have tried this on my eMacs and the old iMacs. Nothing has made a
difference. We have been in touch with our Apple SE's and they gave
us most of the suggestions that I have all ready tried. Any help
would be great. Thanks.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

I have a complex issue here. I am an IT for a school district and we
are using Office 2004 throughout the district. At two schools we are
having issues with Office, mostly Word, loading very slowly(1-10
min).

Does Word display "Rebuilding font cache" when you launch it??
What you describe happens very often when something changes with the
fonts on the Mac. If some fonts get activate, or deactivated, Word (or
Excel or PPT) detects the changes and has to rebuild the cache.
That's a serious issue with Font Management utilities for instance (and
sometimes insetup like yours if you add/remove fonts from shared network
locations),


Corentin

 

[Chris]

Does Word display "Rebuilding font cache" when you launch it??


I have not seen it say this. There has been no changing of fonts.
These computers are used by students, who are limited users and I
don't think they have rights to change fonts. The only time that the
fonts have been messed with was when I did it as listed above. Even
my test users have this problem and there has been no changes made to
them since the beginning of the year when in worked a little better.
Thanks.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Does Word display "Rebuilding font cache" when you launch it??


I have not seen it say this. There has been no changing of fonts.
These computers are used by students, who are limited users and I
don't think they have rights to change fonts. The only time that the
fonts have been messed with was when I did it as listed above. Even
my test users have this problem and there has been no changes made to
them since the beginning of the year when in worked a little better.
Thanks.

Is there anything displayed in the splash screen as the application
launches then?? Usually, you can follow the progress of the launch
there.

Corentin

 

[Mickey Stevens]

I have not seen it say this. There has been no changing of fonts.
These computers are used by students, who are limited users and I
don't think they have rights to change fonts. The only time that the
fonts have been messed with was when I did it as listed above. Even
my test users have this problem and there has been no changes made to
them since the beginning of the year when in worked a little better.
Thanks.

If the user has last used Word on another machine, I believe that the Office
Font Cache has to rebuilt the first time Word is launched on the new
machine. This can take a short while, though 1 minute and upwards seems
unreasonable.

 

[John McGhie [MVP Word, Word Mac]]

Hi Chris:

Where are the users' home directories?

When it starts, Word needs to open 30-odd different files, and it stores a
whole lot of user information (such as the Font Cache) in the user's local
account.

If it is having to round-trip to the authentication server to get permission
to open these resources, then it will be slow.

If the user's previous session is not available, Word has to build all of
its caches each time, and that will be slow.

Hope this helps

--

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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]