Computer Slow Opening Word Documents

I recently had a customer call me complaining of a slow computer.  After a few questions I discovered that it was only slow when right-clicking on files, or when opening MS Office documents (Word, Excel etc) from Windows explorer.  This particular user was part of a small network using Windows XP Professional and connected to a small business server.

Thanks to some tips from online forums I was able to get to the bottom of this.  I'd already tried:

• Reinstalling Office
• Registry cleaner (ccleaner)
• Log on as a different user
• Chkdsk
• Performance monitor
• File type associations
• Disable DDE

Nothing was having any effect, using Perfmon.exe I could see that the computer was quite simply doing nothing for about 10 seconds when trying to open a word file then all of a sudden it would kick into life.

So what was happening?

This post pointed me to the answer http://howtotroubleshoot.blogspot.com/2008/05/double-clicked-documents-slow-to-open.html

On this occasion running netstat -ano in the command shell showed me that the desktop was connected to only the server and the router until I tried to open a Word document when suddenly it sent a SYN packet to another local IP - this user's old computer.

There were no mapped drives to this computer and searching the registry for the IP address gave no results.  However when I searched the registry for the old computer's name then it came up under several keys relating to Firefox.

I uninstalled firefox but the problem didn't go away.  I did another search of the registry and this entry still came up under a firefox key so I simply deleted it.  Hey presto! Problem solved.

Don't ask me why but this is how I solved it.

For further information, or to have this problem solved for you remotely by our team of technicians, please contact The PC Support Group on +44 (0) 845 2233116, or visit our website http://www.pcsupportgroup.com/