Slow opening of Excel attchments in Outlook 2003

I have a client with an IBM R40 laptop running Office 2003 under Windows XP Pro SP2, fully patched. Office 2003 is also fully patched. Office 2000 Pro was previously installed and is still installed, but not used.

At times Excel and Word attachments open extremely slowly. THe problem existed previously when using Office 2000 Pro.

I have removed unnecessary and unused user processed and turned off speech recognition and handwriting recognition features.

If I have placed this in the incorrect place my appologies.

 

It is likely to be your antivirus program scanning doc and xls files when you open them. Try turning this off in your antivirus program. In Nortons this is found in the options under Miscellaneous-Office Plug-in. Take the tick out of it.

Can also be your macro security level if you have active macros in the docs you are trying to open. In Tools-Macros-Security you can try setting your macro level to low. This option is in both excel and word.

Macro viruses are pretty much a blast from the past, and you dont really need macro security set higher than low, if you have adequate virus protection on your PC.