A client explained to me recently that everything on their machine was operating well except for Microsoft Word 2003 which took a very long time to start. A quick test showed that in fact all the Office apps bar Word started instantaneously – in fact impressively so. Word was so slow I was able to walk to another machine – start several apps including word and return before it had started.
I asked what the machine was being specifically used for in Word and was told that various templates had been created on the machine to produce labels for shelves and displays in a SuperMarket.
Solution ?
The normal template had become corrupt and was now several megabytes in size despite being empty. The name of blank documents when opened was document2 – which was partially the reason I found the template issue. So in this case locating the normal.dot and renameing it before starting Word – made the startup instantaneous again and a very happy customer.