Double-Clicked Documents Slow to Open In Word

I've seen a mysterious problem crop up to many Microsoft Word users: you double-click a Document (or even Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation, etc.), and the computer hangs for a a little bit, and then the document opens. Equally irritating is that opening the document from File > Open inside of Word is usually nice and snappy. Fingers have been pointed at (insert name of Office application here), Windows, networks, printers, and antivirus software.

Well, the short answer is this: they're all suspect. Here's how to try to track down this problem:

Antivirus
This is the most common scapegoat. People think, "that dumb antivirus is stealing my precious time while trying to scan my document." Well, that may or may not be true. Norton has a historically problematic Office antivirus addin (officeav.dll), but that has improved over the last couple of years. Still, you might try disabling your antivirus and then try opening another document. If the problem goes away, then you know who's to blame. Try a reinstall of your AV, or look for a better solution.

Printers
I guess this one makes sense. Word uses the printer to gather information about layout, etc. Some people have noticed this because they say that they document looks different on different computers. This is (usually) because the printer driver is different. So, here's how to fix this problem:

1. Open Control Panel (Start > Control Panel on XP)
2. Open Folder Options
3. Click the View tab
4. In the Advanced Settings list, uncheck "Automatically search for network folders and printers"
5. Click OK
6. Double-click a document

If the problem is gone, then you don't have to go any further. Even if it's not gone, you'll likely see an overall performance increase in Windows with this disabled.

Networks
Well, I'm not a network admin. But, here's some interesting information that I gathered from a help forum the other day.

1. During the long hanging period, the user did this at the command line (Start > run > type cmd and hit enter):

• exec netstat -a
• look for a line with "SYN_SENT"

1. the user found an IP address to an old network share
2. the user did a find in the registry (Start > Run > type regedit and hit enter > Edit > Find) for the IP address. After finding and deleting several keys with that obsolete network share address (and closing the Registry Editor), the problem was gone.

Windows
This was a more obscure problem that I hadn't considered. I read on a support forum that DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) could become corrupted, like most things in Windows. DDE has never been reliable, but has always been relied on in Office. This is a big part of Office's instability. It's used to facilitate interoperability between Office components/applications, and Windows. For example, in Office 97, it was the primary mechanism for connecting mail merge data sources and main documents. Anyway, here's how to disable it for opening Word documents:

1. Go to Control Panel > Folder Options > File Types
2. Find and select Word Documents (DOC)
3. Click the Advanced button
4. Select Open in the Actions section
5. Click the Edit button
6. Uncheck "Use DDE"
7. Put your cursor on the "Application used to perform action:" box
   
   
8. Arrow all the way to the right and put in "%1" (include the quote marks)
9. If there is a /dde remove it
10. Click OK, then OK, then OK
11. Try to open another document

If that works, then you may want to repeat the steps for other Office document types (xls, ppt, docm (if using Office 2007), etc.).



[UPDATE! 08/15/2008]
There have been great comments with little tweaks about how people got this working for them. Thank you all so much for your comments! I'd like to highlight one in particular as it presents a whole new level of troubleshooting. I won't go into detail about the steps, but I think advanced users will want to experiment with this a little bit (I've added a few URLs to help):

It works but with side effect. Doubleclick opens new instance of excel, word ... Better solution is to find out what application causes this delay. I use ddespy.exe that shows all dde messages sent. If there is a problem, the list stops after certain message sent and waits. You can see HWND handle of the window that causes the delay (in dde message). After that you need to find process or application that this window belongs to. I use "Windows Modifier". Then uninstall this application and that's all.
In my case it was Toshiba Bluetooth driver that caused the delay in starting office documents.

If any of these steps fixed the problem, consider yourself lucky and happy. If not, then at least you know what didn't work. If these these steps don't solve the problem, but you do figure out another solution, then post it in the comments!