Office 2003 apps pause randomly -- why??

[ftechguy]

I have had a problem of several new computers running windows XP pro and Office 2003. In any office app (word, excel, outlook, etc.), random pauses of about 1-2 seconds occur randomly while the users work. They could be typing, clicking, highlighting, etc. and the pause will happen and the app becomes completely unresponsive. The pauses happen anywhere from 5-15 seconds apart. The programs work, but the pauses are extremely annoying to the users.

They are brand new system, 2.4ghz+, 256mb+ ram, with all windows and office updates installed, mcafee AV and fixed swap file size.

A look at the task manager shows nothing consistent that can be causing the problem. MDM.exe seems to popup at the pauses most often, but not all the time.

Does anybody have any fixes or suggest things I can try??
Thanks.

 

[pauldes]

Did these PCs come from an image? If so, does the image contain references to network locations? I've had this happen to me before where I've had network places to shares that no longer existed. What I might try is deleting all the network places and mapped drives and reestablish them. Another way to verify this is to turn off all the autosave features in the applications. If they are trying to go to the users network share, those nonexistent network references would hold you up during this process.

 

[ftechguy]

The PCs were all Dell's. They had a bunch of network shares and mapped drives so I did delete them and reconnected. That didn't do it, but upon restarting, everything seemed ok. These computers are on 24/7 so maybe it was some memory leak..