winword.exe slow on RDS2016

Question

Hi,

On one of our customer sites; were experiencing slowness in Ms Word on a RDS2016 server.

Envoirement:

• Ms Server 2016 ( Updated with 2020-07 patches )
• Office365 Pro Plus ( installed with ODT ) Patch level 2002 ( Half year routine )

We have 12 users on this machine, 11 users are going great; and no issues. winword.exe starts within 2 seconds.

1 user has a winword.exe loading time of about 30 seconds.

What we have done allready:

• Rebooted the server
• Patched the server, latest is 2020-07
• Patched Office365 ProPlus, Update level is 202002 ( Half Year routine )
• Upgraded the Antivirus ( ESET ) Also disabled it.
• Disabled all plugins from Office.
• Reloaded the normal.dot file

Lots of things that we tried unfortunatly nothing works.

Then we started looking with Procmon to see what the process winword.exe is doing.

With procmon we saw that over 1600 entries of the following;

The time that this regkey is trying to open; is also our delay in Word.
But when we check if the user, and SYSTEM can read/write in this location there seems nothing wrong. The users has read/write rights on this location.

Can someone help me with this issue ? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Hi,
For your issue,
1.Is the same net the users using?
2.Is there any gateway deployed?Did the users open the app installed on the session host or the app just published on the web?
3.Have you compare the procmon of the normal users with the issue users?
4.Maybe you could try to view the even log the time the issue happens.note the time the user starts opening the app and the time the app is opened.check the event log in this time period.
you can refer to the following logs:
event viewer>windows logs>Application\system\setup
event viewer>Application and services logs>microsoft>windows>remote app and desktop connections\RemoteDesktopServices-RdpCoreTS\TerminalServices-ClientActiveXCore\TerminalServices-LocalSessionManager\TerminalServices-RemoteConnectionManager

5.If this user use the other office app will the same issue happen?
6.You could create a test account and let the issue user log with this account and then open the app to see if the same issue happen in this way.

Answer 2

Hi PhoebeLu,

1. Only one user is affected
2. Yes there is a gateway deployed. There opening apps on the session host.
3. Yes, Procmon only shows the issue with this one user.
4. Event logs does not show anything.
5. Only Word, Excel, Powerpoint has this behavior. Outlook, Onenote and Publisher are starting normally.
6. We have made a new user; and on the new created user the problem isnt there. Only one existing user has this.

We cannot create a new useraccount for this user; its the CEO, and he want to keep all his personal settings in place, and dont want to set up all his preferences again.
So thats why we want to find out what we can do about this problem.

Today we patched the Office to build 2007, but the issue persist on this user. Also we installed the "additional" updates on the server, but unfortunately this didnt help.

Answer 3

Hi，
For your issue,
1.when both normal user and CEO user log on RDS server ,can you enter below command line in command prompt on both normal user'session and CEO user'session respectively,are they applied the same policy ?
gpresult /h c:\rds.html

2."By renaming the hive (which is clearly a cache of some type) the problem was solved and Office applications recreated the missing registry key with a much smaller number of entries."
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/office-365-slow-to-open/2e43e839-2d8a-49e6-b93d-db31e2d638ff

Hope this can help you!--please don't forget to Accept as answer if the reply is helpful--
Best regards