Slow opening documents

[Rex]

Can anyone explain why Word 2007 is so slow in opening documents. Am running
Vista 64 and it takes say 30 secs to open or close a document. It also takes
up to a minute to print a doc from word or say a PDF.

Am I missing something in my setup?

 

[L Sangree]

Do you have any links to Excel in your Word document?
If yes
Have you unchecked "Update Automatic Updates" (Office Button, Word
Options, Advanced)?
If yes
Close all your applications and start Task Manager
Open your Word Document in a small window so you can see Task Manager
You will see a new process start and stop for Excel for EVERY link
in your document which obviously slows down the opening

A Microsoft engineer confirmed for me that this is a known issue with no
known solution. He advised us to save all documents in the binary (.doc,
..xls) format instead of the new XML (.docx, .xlsx) format since we have so
many links that some of our docs take FIVE minutes to open.

Is this a problem for others? Why doesn't unchecking the update box STOP
this? Why is this STILL a problem so long after 2007 came out?!