Word open slowly while 3party plugin is installed

[ralf.linhard@lgl.bayern.de]

Hello,

since a half a year we found following interesting problem with word 2003

while opening a word document on a fileserver and have no solution.

Prerequisits:

- native Windows XP SP2 installation and all security patches

- Office 2003 Professional SP3 and all security patches

- any 3party Word-Plugin; We've tested it with

- PDFMaker-Plugin (Adobe), VIS-Compact-Plugin (PDV) and the International

Character Toolbar-Plugin (Mircosoft)

- We've tested it with a Windows Server 2003 Standard based fileserver and a

NetApp FAS based Fileserver.

Now following SMB network traffic behaviour will occur "only" if you open a

Word-document by the Windows Explorer interface -> e.g. by double click or

"open" by the context menu:

4480 16:23:15.707217 10.96.101.45 10.87.34.199 SMB Trans2 Request, QUERY_PATH_INFO, Query File Basic Info, Path: \Software\_Progs\Windows\Installation

4483 16:23:15.721372 10.87.34.199 10.96.101.45 SMB Trans2 Response, QUERY_PATH_INFO

4484 16:23:15.721485 10.96.101.45 10.87.34.199 SMB Trans2 Request, QUERY_PATH_INFO, Query File Basic Info, Path: \Software\_Progs\Windows\Installation

4485 16:23:15.735547 10.87.34.199 10.96.101.45 SMB Trans2 Response, QUERY_PATH_INFO

(this is an excerpt by Wireshark - sequencno,time,source,destination,smb-request)

Depending on which plugin is installed you'll have the same SMB-request in

this manner 30 to 250 times in average. We measerud also values of hundrets

of the same SMB request. After then a document will be opened. This behavior

cause a lot of unnessessary network traffic and an opening process can take

several minutes! (max measured value is about 25min)

We have about 1000 employees, ~800 people work over LAN and about ~200 work

over WAN on different locations.

Does anybody have seen this strange behavior too or similar experience?

Thanks for anticipation!