Help!!! Slowness in Office and no obvious solution

[Nancy R]

Hi,

We have a strange problem with the office installations on the majority of
our client PCs. Here is the scenario:

-15 XP SP1 PCs with Office 2000 installed via admin install from Server1.
-15 users with roaming profiles on a W2K3 domain.
-Moved all data and information to Server2
-Changed all group policy settings, printers and login script drive mappings
to point to Server2
-Verified systems OK (left running for several days with no problems or
missing data) and then decommissioned Server1

Here is our problem, the minute we took down Server1 all of our users
started complaining of extreme slowness when opening files in Excel. We
brougt Server1 backup and the slowness went away. A second try to confirm it
wasn't just a coincedence produced the same results.

Here is what we have done so far:

-verified users have all drives mapping to Server2 and no left over drives
from Server1 existed
-verified that there are no disconnected or unavailable network drives
-cleaned out Recent Files lists (both "My Recent Documents" and the "Recent"
folder in each user's profile) - this improved things slightly
-verified that the "Default File Location" and Startup folders in Excel are
not pointing to Server1
-verified that NO settings in any GPO we use are pointing to Server1 (I
couldn't find any) and triple-checked this with RSoP
-verified that all shortcuts they do use are mapped correctly (with drive
letters as opposed to UNC paths)
-verified that printers are mapping to Server2 and not Server1
-verified that the documents do not contain links to anything on the old
server

Now there are a couple of things to note as well:

1) We are not running and Norton Antivirus products.
2) We have 4 systems that are not affected. The key differences are that
they are running Office 2003 and that it was installed via an admin install
from Server2.

I am at a loss as to what could be causing the slowness but we really need
to pull Server1 offline. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks,
Nancy

 

[Nancy R]

Hi,

I wanted to provide an update to this and see if anyone could help me out
with the correct syntax.

I have found article 267367 on the MS site which outlines how to update the
install path but I keep getting a message that the MSI cannot be opened (I
know it's good because I can run it manually).

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;267362

The article says to run "MSIEXEC /i admin path\MSI file REINSTALL=ALL
REINSTALLMODE=vomus /qb" from each workstation.

I think this will work but I have a couple of questions on this:

*is this just the path to the std.msi file or the path to the MSi plus the
transform?
*will this affect all users or only the admin account that runs the command?
*does anyone have any idea how long this takes to run when it's successful?
I have to do this on each of our systems and am trying to guesstimate how
long it will take.

The other possible cause is that we have an OPS file that is executed at
each login. It resets the user settings and I noticed that the
"AppDataFolder" variable is pointing to the old server. Is there any way to
quickly modify this variable/file without redoing the settings on another
system?

Thanks in advance for any assistance,
Nancy