Windows XP File Dialogs Very Slow

Question

I'm using Win XP SP3, and I'm finding that the Windows File dialogs (Import, Save File As etc) are incredibly slow in MS apps such as Access and Word.

By default, these dialog boxes open up in "My Documents". Clicking the dropdown to change the location can take 30-40 secs, during which time, if I click again, the window title displays 'Not responding'.

Once it does respond, I can click on 'c:\' in the dropdown, and it refreshes the list below almost instantly, but when I click on a folder such as 'Program Files', it will take ~30 secs again, before it opens.

This problem used to happen sporadically before, but now it's pretty constant. I run a small home office network, but I haven't made any changes in quite a long time (eg machines, mapped drives etc). Of course, I have been applying MS patches though.

Has anyone found similar issues, and perhaps the cause?

MTIA

Answer 1

'a slow network drive' would be my first guess too.

disconnect all mapped drives/folders and see whether this makes a difference, then reconnect the network drives one by one to find the culprit.

Answer 2

One thing you may want to try is to turn off the automatic zipfile directory (compressed folder) support.

regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll

This always slows me down in Explorer, it may be having a similar effect with the common dialogs if you have a lot of, or large, zip files.

Answer 3

Are there any drives that are disconnected under "My Computer" ? If so, can you connect to them, or are they permanently disconnected? If so, remove them.

Otherwise, try deleting the contents of your \Microsoft\Office\Recent\ folder.. check out this thread for more info.