Word Slow opening Templates folder

[polymath5]

Got a puzzler!
NT4sp6a Servers running WINS. XPsp1 clients running Office 2Ksp3. Running on 100 LAN. All have 512MB RAM.

The workgroup templates folder lives on a network drive mapped to S:\Templates

When I click on the New icon or File/New it can take up to 25 seconds for the dialog that displays templates to open.

On a similar machine (identical hardware) running W2KproSp3 and Office 97, opening the same folder takes 4 seconds.

This template folder has 11 subfolders and 65 files, a combination of .dot and .xlt files. None of the files are overly large for templates. Most are quite small. There are a couple of .doc and .xls files in there also.

On either the XP or W2K machines, opening the folder from Explorer takes 3 seconds. So it doesn't seem to be a network connectivity issue.

I really don't understand why the XP box Word is taking so long to open the folder. It is similarly slow on my XP with Office 2003 on it. Any Ideas???

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Mens et Manus
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[polymath5]

Found what seems to have corrected the problem. In one of the sub-folders there were 5 shortcuts to templates living on a different share.

That other share had security settings that only permit certain users access. Deleting these changed the time it took for the templates dialog box to appear from 30 seconds to 3 seconds.

The only question I have is why Word97 didn't have the speed problem the way Word 2000 and later does. Interesting...

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Mens et Manus
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