I have a friend how has a problem with Word 2003. It could be happening in Excel and PowerPoint, but she doesn’t use those so we don’t know.

Word opens fine, and if you find a file you want to open through My Computer or Windows Explorer, and you double-click it the file opens quickly.

However, if you attempt to open a document through the following method you run into a problem. If you open Word, click the Open button or go File >> Open, and than click the Look in: drop down arrow to browse to a different location it takes between 7 and 10 seconds for the menu to drop down. This happens every time when you first attempt to do this after opening Word. If I leave Word open and do it again it’s fine (if I remember correctly).

The problem persists, however, as I choose a new drive to look at and begin double-clicking on folders to open them. I’ll get a 7 to 10 second delay attempting to open some folders, and virtually no delay when attempting to open others. For the most part, however, there is a delay. Just like I stated above with the Look in: drop down menu, however, once I’ve gone into a folder this way it opens up very quickly from that point on, as long as I don’t close Word. If I close Word the problems start up again.

I tried a number of things to resolve the issue. I started Word in safe mode and that didn’t work. I tried turning off DDE something or other by going Control Panel >> Folder Options >> File Types, choosing DOC, clicking Advanced, choosing Open and clicking Edit. From there I unchecked the Use DDE checkbox and changed the “Application used to perform this action” from this:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE" /n /dde

to this:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE" %1

And I even tried this:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE" “%1”

Because some sources said to put the quotes around the %1 and some didn’t. I also opened Task Manager and watched the processes while attempting to bring down the drop down list or menu but that didn’t show anything unusual. Lastly, or as far as I can remember lastly, I did netstat –an and hit the drop down menu when it would take up to 10 seconds to work in order to look for an IP address that might have a sync-sent message or something like that. There was nothing.

The one thing I did that make an immediate difference and seemed to fix the problem completely was disconnecting her from the network entirely. When I unplugged her network cable from her PC and opened Word, clicked the Open button and clicked the Look in: drop down menu it all worked perfectly fine.

Does anyone have any idea what is causing this problem? I’ve done Google searches, read through pages and pages of ideas from other forums and Microsoft KB articles, but I’ve got nothing.