Office Documents Freezing while Opening over VPN Connection

Issue: Microsoft office documents freezing for remote users when opening from a network drive while connection to VPN connection but works fine when moving same document from network drive to a local drive.

Solution: Recently a user was having issues opening excel files, were by a 600kb file could take around 20 seconds to open. When you copied this file locally to the computer it opened it straight away, and other computers accessing the file had no problem. What I did notice was when you opened the file, the network usage would spike to 7mb/s for the entire time while only retrieving a 600kb file. Opening .pdf / .doc files around double or triple the size would open instantly. After much searching the fix was actually pretty recent from microsft http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2570623 “reduces performance due to the network traffic when reading in the parts of the workbook” So upgrade to 2007/2010 or disable OFV!

Create a .reg file with the bellow information to perform the task:

For Excel: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Excel\Security] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Excel\Security\FileValidation] "EnableOnLoad"=dword:00000000 For Word: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Security] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Security\FileValidation] "EnableOnLoad"=dword:00000000

You can use the EnableOnLoad registry entry to configure how you want Excel to handle opening workbooks for the OFV. By default, the EnableOnLoad entry is not present in the Windows registry. To add the EnableOnLoadentry to the Windows registry, follow these steps:
 * 1) Exit Excel.
 * 2) Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
 * 3) Locate and then click to select the following registry key:
 * HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0 Old key
 * HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\
 * 1) After you select the key that is specified in step 3, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
 * 2) Type Excel, and then press ENTER.
 * 3) Select Excel, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
 * 4) Type Security, and then press ENTER.
 * 5) Select Security, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
 * 6) Type FileValidation, and then press ENTER.
 * 7) Select FileValidation, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click DWORD Value.
 * 8) Type EnableOnLoad, and then press ENTER. Note: The default value is 0 which disables the validation.
 * 9) On the File menu, click Exit to quit Registry Editor.

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