For a while now I was having problems opening Word and Excel (2007 and 2010) documents on my work computer. Most of the time everything would work, but every now-and-again I’d go to open something and Word or Excel would report that it was “Downloading <filename>”, and simply get stuck. Although I could click the little ‘X’ to cancel and close the window, the process for either Word or Excel would stay active, and any attempts to kill it would fail. In the end, I’d have to hard power off the computer to get it to shutdown, and then do a cold boot.
Oh, 'Downloading' message, how I hate thee.
I wasn’t really bothered by it until a few of my users started reporting the same problem. I had a look in to it, and after a lot of fiddling, came across two Microsoft Knowledge Base articles that eventually led me to a solution.
By adding the registry value from the first KB article linked above (EnableShellDataCaching), and by removing the Group Policy object that was creating a persistent drive mapping and replacing it with a login script (below) to map the drive, I haven’t had any further reports of the problem.
REM Login Script – Paste these lines in to a batch file, and add that .bat file to a GPO
net use z: /deletenet use z: \10.0.0.100share
1:00 am, July 29, 2010BenB /
Good article – helped me out thanks.
It was happening to me when I left my computer on overnight or put it in hibernate. When I tried to use it in the morning Word and Excel were hanging – before implementing the registry key fix, I also noticed that you can work around the problem by opening the mapped drive first, then reattepting Word/Excel.
12:38 am, December 1, 2010Tijs VdB /
A little over a month ago this problem was reported to me by one of my customers. They are a small office running on Windows 7 + Office 2010 on the client and an SBS 2008 server.
I’ve tried the steps you suggested, but no luck. =( We figured it might have something to do with the antivirus we use, Symantec Endpoint Protection, and after uninstalling it the problem actually disappeared…until today, I just got a phonecall saying the problem is back
To make things more complicated, the problem is only happening on 1-2 of 10 identical computers. If I can’t find a solution soon, I’ll be forced to reinstall the machine, which seems a bit drastic =(
Anyways, thanks for the article, it’s been helpful and I’m ‘happy’ to find out I’m not the only one experiencing this problem.
8:12 am, December 1, 2010Laslow /
I’d actually forgotten about this article – I should mention that the problem cropped up again for me as well a while after doing this. I eventually solved the problem for good by changing the login script to map drives by IP address rather than FQDN.