Word 2003 opens slowly

[Guest]

I just updated to Microsoft Office 2003. My fiiles are so slow to open. I
read posts, and disconnected my Norton antivirus, which helped with Excel
opening quicker. Word is still slow.

When I open Word through Run: winword.exe /a Word opens very quickly. I
notice under templates and add-ins when I open it through "run" that the
boxes are not checked for DVZWDAddin.dot and PDFwriter97.dot, which I believe
is why it's opening so quickly that way.

When I open Word not through "run" but just by clicking on the icon on my
desktop, the two boxes above are checked, and it takes forever to open any
Word document. I can't seem to remove those two from the template.

I have saved a new template as normal.old or normal.2, but I can't get Word
to default to open one of those instead of normal, which has the two boxes
checked. When I go to my template folder on C drive, "normal" is not there.
So how do I delete the normal folder and get my Word program to open under my
new template that does not have those two boxes checked?

Any ideas? Thanks

Laura

 

[Anne Troy]

Laura: Check your Startup folder.
(I always do a Windows file/folder search for "Startup" and then determine
which one is Office. Open only FOLDERS and look for those files and remove
them. I hate PDFWriter and I don't think it'll work right in Word 2003
anyway, and I don't know what the dvzw... is something called Documents To
Go, which I've never heard of. If you're not using them, remove them.
************
Hope it helps!
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com

 

[Guest]

Thank you. That was the one step I forgot. Both those items were in there
and I deleted them, and now it opens like a charm!

Laura

 

[Anne Troy]

Great!
************
Hope it helps!
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com

 

[Guest]

Hi There,
I have a new PC with OFC 2003 basic and word, excel open slowly and take a
long time just to view the properties....I have repaired and reinstalled
office and to no avail....I have one template that is used but this is slow
on all M$ apps related files..
Any clues on where to dig ?

Thanks
Mark

 

[Anne Troy]

See:
http://www.officearticles.com/word/microsoft_word_takes_a_long_time_to_open.htm
************
Hope it helps!
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com

 

[Guest]

Mark

One more thing that I did that helped open Word faster is on the link that
Anne had below. Go to My Computer, tools, folder options, view, and release
the hidden files. Do a search for normal.dot - looking in hidden files as
well. When the normal.dot file comes up, rename it abnormal.dot. Hope it
helps. I'm optimistic that my Word files will keep opening quickly
now...this has been really frustrating.

Laura

 

[Guest]

Hi Anne,
I have been trying everything to get word to open faster. Updated office 97
to office 2003. Works gret on laptop, slow on desktop.
I have two STARTUP folders: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office &
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11. Do I need both of these?
The .dot within these are: A20MSW00.DOT & AddrFixr.dot. Do I need these?
Thanks for you help.

 

[Guest]

Hi Marshal,

You might also want to check your Normal.dot template - it's probably in
your C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
directory. If it's less than 100K, Word should open very quickly. I was
having the same problem with Word 2003 taking forever to open. I took Anne
Troy's advice and deleted a PDFWriter and Data Viz entry from my startup
folder, but this didn't do the trick. I checked the size of my Normal.dot
template and found it to be almost 2.5Mb. It was huge compared to an older
version that I had a copy of which was only 80K. I deleted it and renamed
the older version to Normal.dot and started up Word again. I couldn't
believe how fast it came up....lightening fast. Guess over the years I have
added a whole bunch of crap to my startup template that I really didn't need.

Hope this helps.

- Mark