Anyone ever wrestled with Office 2007 slow document opening and "DDE"?

[YeOldeStonecat]

Holy cow what a pain this one was....
Client that is relatively far away...a gold club on an island. She has been complaining about files opening up painfully slowly...kept saying something wrong with the server, something wrong with the workstations. And complained that workstations often hung during bootup and shutdown.

Every time I remote into the server...seems responsive enough.
Pair of Dell Optiplex 780 workstations..C2D, 4 gigs RAM, XPp. Server is a Dell PE T310 I think, Xeon quad core, 16 gigs of RAM, pair of 10k SAS RAID 1 OS, three 10k SAS RAID 5 data, SBS2008.
1x other desktop in golf pro shop but he doesn't do much but surf and catch malware.
Another couple of computers across the island at the day camp that do Outlook Anywhere from this SBS box.

So I go out earlier this week....pair of brand new HDs to clone over on the workstations just for good measure. Do a little tweaking with them, BIOS flashes, chipset driver updates, yank out the Embassy Wave stuff that seemed to hang shutdown (tdmsomething process), remove Windows Desktop Search which causes hangs after login. Clone/replace the drives...workstations are now running like champs...like a C2D 4 gig WinXP box should run.

Do BIOS update and other drivers updates on the server...C drive was getting cramped so I moved WSUS from C to F drive....basically server was running OK but I threw a bit at it, seemed to run a hair better.

Update NOD to V5 on the workstations and 4.5 on the server.

Now..she shows me the Office issue. Double tap a document or spreadsheet on the servers shared/common drive...and Word or Excel take a bit to open..and often take forever to populate. Sometimes a couple of minutes. However...open up Word or Excel first...file...open..browse to the file...pops right open.

Check for add-ons...really only had Avery label in there...no difference.

Do some Google-Fu...stumble upon "DDE". Basically in the Windows file association for those files, to run a virus scan on the file before opening. Do some more checking, seems a more radical issue with people that had Eset v4, and Office 2007, and files on Server 08. Some tried disabling SMB2...I tried that..although it shouldn't matter with XP clients, server should kick down to SMB1 for XP.

So I find where to disable DDE in Excel...and it works! Double tap a file on the server and it pops right open.

(Open Microsoft Excel 2007.
Click on the Office 2007 button (top left)
Click on "Excel Options" near the bottom right.
In the left navigation area, select "Advanced"
On the right side scroll all the way down to "General’
In the General group there is an option, "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)"
Select this option
Click on OK
Close Excel 2007)

However, there is no way (that I can find) to go into Word and disable DDE.

There is also a way to disable it within Windows, in the file association area...
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20488388-XP-Home-Word-and-Excel-slow-to-open-document

But I can't get it to stick with Word..every time I go back and check it DDE is checked again.

Anyone stumble across any 3rd party utilities to disable this?

 

[bertie40]

Maybe totally unrelated / off the mark.

Does that system have an update called "office file validation"

This resulted in similar effects to what you encountered.

VERY slow opening documents.

I uninstalled that update

Fixed.

 

[scott00049]

Have you tried this workaround?

I found the below possible solution at: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/253596-word-2003-slow-to-open-documents-from-network

Not sure if it is your answer, but it looks like it worked for the people on that forum....


Pimiento
Ad12 Oct 30, 2012 at 5:11 AM
Insert this entry in your registry and it will do the trick

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Security]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Security\FileValidation]
"EnableOnLoad"=dword:00000000

Enjoy folks!

Spice(2) · Reply

-Scott

 

[scott00049]

Yeah Bertie, the solution I posted above is a way to turn off the File Validation update that you are talking about. So I think you are onto something.

-Scott

 

[johnrobert]

What about upgrading to office 2010

 

[Steve202]

Seen this problem loads of times. Spent ages messing with the settings in office but could never get it to work correctly, so I just remove the office file validation update. Just uninstall it using Add/Remove Programs.

 

[itsJim]

oh yeah these issues can be fun. there is a microsoft fixit tool that i've seen resolve this. otherwise there is a dde monitor tool you can try using. i had to use this for one of my clients that had a pc in the office which no longer existed and dde kept looking for files on it. after removing the workstation from mobsyc and all \\missingworkstation entries in the registry the issue was resolved.. good times...

 

[TenYardFight]

Sounds vaguely familiar. Thanks for posting the solution. By the way guys, O.P. posted a/the solution!

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

What about upgrading to office 2010

Proposed....but their club software has some functions that rely on MS Access...and historically this software is "behind the times". Meaning...if one installs the latest Office product...thus latest Access run times...some functions with the Club software will break. She is checking with their support people on that.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'll give the "uninstall Office File Validation" thing a try....but from what I know about that functionality, it's not related to DDE. Due to my turning DDE on and off several times with Excel...and verifying the same results which confirmed it was the issue, I'm not sure yanking OFV will help...but worth a go since it's just a minutes time.

 

[Steve202]

How did you get on?
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