Opening Excel documents on a network share is slow and has green ribbon in the address bar
Scenario: I have a Windows 7 client that accesses a share hosted on a Windows 2008 server. The network share opens very fast and has no issues. I should also point out that the share is mapped as a drive letter via a GPO. The files are displayed in Details view. The Windows 7 client is not indexing network shares. Offline files have been completely disabled in Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Sync Center. When I double click on an Excel document, the address bar in the Explorer window displays the green ribbon progress bar and the document takes seemingly forever to open. And when it does finally open, it opens in Read-Only. I can then close the document and it will then reopen fine and fast. The strange thing is this is not a consistent behavior as it happens almost at random. I was under the assumption that the green ribbon is pertaining to indexing, however I must be wrong. Anyone else seeing this behavior? All other client OSes are not experiencing this issue.
April 9th, 2010 6:49pm

Hi, We have seen similar issues in this forum. You may refer the following thread to troubleshoot. Windows Search and Offline Files If there is any update for this issue, please post here.Arthur Xie - MSFT
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April 13th, 2010 11:20am

i got this problem too ,windows 7 + office 2003, Opening Excel documents on a network share is very slow and has green ribbon in the addres . anybody know how to slove it ?
April 15th, 2010 10:54am

Arthur, I noticed your six medals so I hope you're able to further explore and help with this issue. Your link to similar issues doesn't address the original Excel question. My experience is similar to ktaber's, but there's more: - I sometimes (not always, no pattern that I can find) get the green slowly filling progress bar in the address bar as ktaber did. - not only in Excel, but also in MS Word there's a small circle with a red X inside, on the status bar of Excel or Word, and the document or spreadsheet takes forever to open. I don't notice this for PDFs or DWG files. - Occurs when opening a file on a network share. - I think it may be related to search indexing, but that's my intuition. Don't have evidence to support this idea. - This issue is affecting our productivity. We are a company that needs to move fast, and generally Windows 7 helps us to move fast. But this issue is very, very frustrating. -- SBS 2008 Server, upgraded to latest hardware six months ago. 2 terabytes storage in RAID array on a 3ware RAID controller card. XEON x3440 CPU, 8 GB Ram. Very fast server most of time. -- Client is Windows 7 Pro, AMD Athlon II X4 620 processor, boot disk 80 GB SSD, with (2) 35 GB WD Velociraptor hard drives, 4 GB RAM, Windows Experience Index is 7.2. Very fast machine most of time. Please let us know if you have an answer or pointer. I see allusions to this problem on other forums but no solution. Thanks.
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July 9th, 2010 7:58pm

Did anyone else come up with a solution? We are exeriencing IDENTICAL issues. Thanks!
August 5th, 2010 5:44pm

No solution found yet! This obviously affects a fair number of people, as I've had the problem for months and just got frustrated enough to start finding out what's going on. I've just waited over 3 minutes to open a Microsoft 2007 Word document over a network share. The file is 358 KB, and I instantaneously opened a 559 KB PDF file in the same folder. This is a Microsoft on Microsoft problem - can one of the MVPs here please help? I hate to use one of my Technet support incidents to fix this - would rather save it for a big, bad server problem.
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August 11th, 2010 2:12am

I too am experiencing this on my network. I'd love to see some answer to this. Anything, really.
August 26th, 2010 10:36pm

This is ridiculous but I may have to use a Microsoft support incident to solve this. Everyone in my office has to wait 5 minutes in the mornings while their first Excel or Word document downloads and opens from a gigabyte speed connected network drive. I imagine it has something to do with search indexing. It is a Microsoft-only problem, as PDFs open immediately. Our network is Microsoft SBS 2008 and Windows 7 or Vista computers with MS Office 2007 files.
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September 10th, 2010 9:36pm

I did use an MS support incident from Technet subscription, and after numerous hours and close to 30 days of working with tech support, may finally have an answer. Installed the hotfix referenced in the knowledge base article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982860. This morning my file opened immediately on my Windows 7 client. Only two problems that I see, as the hotfix addresses Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. 1. We're running SBS 2008, and I understand this is not R2. R2 is part of SBS 7, I believe. 2. We have had the same behavior mentioned in the KB article on Word 2007 (docx) files, Excel 2007 (xlsx) files, running on both Windows 7 and Vista - both OSes here are 64 bit. The KB article references Word 2003 (doc) files. Other than these discrepancies the KB article and hotfix look like just what is needed for our problem. Will try on Vista OS and with different combinations next.
October 12th, 2010 5:47pm

I am cautiously optimistic that this problem is resolved. Almost a week has passed with no repeat of the bad behavior. For anyone who cares, here is the explanation I got from MS Tech Support: "...that fix is only for Win7. I was told only Win7 machines had the problem, so I did not send you a Vista fix. Do you need a Vista version? I would not apply anything to your Vista machines unless they are experiencing the problem as well. Hotfixes are not thoroughly tested until they come out rolled up into "service packs". So I hesitate to apply fixes to your Vista machines just for the sake of applying fixes. That hotfix replaces the MRXSMB.sys files on the machine. This file is a driver for the SMB protocol. SMB is the type of connection we make to the server when accessing network shares. If this fix is correcting the issue on you Win7 machines - then the Win7 version of the native SMB protocol is having difficulty providing the updated/refreshed view in a timely manner. The version of the SMB is different in Win7/Win2008R2 vs. Vista/Win2008 vs. XP/Win2003. (which is also why the hotfix is not switchable between Vista and Win7)" I'd been told we were having the problem on Vista 64 machines as well, but didn't directly observe it. Keeping my fingers crossed... :)
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October 19th, 2010 12:19pm

One more thing on this issue. I asked the MS Tech Support guy if anything besides the MRXSMB.sys file replacement on the Win7 machines contributed to the solution. We'd been at it for almost 30 days with MS Tech Support before finding out about the MRXSMB.sys file, with many changes made to the server in that time period. Reply from MS Tech Support: "On the server side, NIC features such as RSS, Chimney, autotune were turned off. I doubt they had any affect, but it is possible. I think the hotfix on the client side was more influential to the issue than anything server side."
October 20th, 2010 2:06pm

Hopefully the new service pack for Win 7 / 2008 R2 corrects this issue. It is an annoyance but work can go on...so I've just had people deal with it.
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November 18th, 2010 4:10pm

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