Excel 2010 is slow to save to a remapped “My Documents” folder on the network

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Here’s the problem. On a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 Server R2 machine, if you save your Excel 2010 documents into a My Documents (or subfolder like My Pictures) that has been re-mapped to a network location you may notice that it takes almost 40 seconds for the save to complete. The behavior is not consistent, however, as the latency does not occur every time you hit the save button.

Fortunately, there is a fix for this problem.

Apparently this was a known issue with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, but the KB article to which this applies doesn't give any indication of the symptom, which is why I never found it. The hotfix contains an update for a Windows 7 networking driver which is causing the problem.

The technical explanation: Excel 2010 makes an API call to Windows via a background thread which is waiting for the network driver to respond, which doesn't happen. The thread then times out and the save operation completes.

Solution:

1. Go to https://support.microsoft.com/kb/981711 – yes, that is the right KB article, even though the title talks about a stop error. Click the 'View and Request Hotfix Downloads' link at the top. Important: If you are downloading this hotfix for a computer other than the one you are viewing the article from then pay close attention to the link next to Step 1 on that page - the page uses an auto-detection script to determine if you are on x86, x64 or I64 systems. If you are wanting to apply this fix to an x86 machine and you are downloading from an x64 machine the hotfix you will receive by default is an x64 hotfix. If you click that link it will show all three hotfix types available.

If you aren't sure which kind of machine you need it or, click the Start button and right click 'Computer' and left click on 'Properties'. Under 'System' the 'System type' will tell you what kind of operating system you are running.

2. Once you have the hotfix for the machine, just double click it. The exe file that you download will extract an MSU file to a directory you specify. After that's done, double click the extracted .MSU file to run it. A system reboot WILL be necessary in most cases.

After the hotfix is applied you should no longer see the save problems. I applied the hotfix to the test machine I had set up and the problem did go away.