Word 2003 Opens Slowly

We have several users on our corporate network who have Word 2003 documents saved to a common drive on our server. some of their Word documents can take 2-3 minutes to open whilst other Word documents open fine. It seems as though this problem began only 4-5 days ago.

I can copy the data from the Word docs, paste into a blank doc, and save under a new name on the same server and the file opens as it should.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can solve the problem? Recreating and saving all the docs that open slowly is really not the best option as there are so many AND we can't be sure now that the problem would not crop up again. I have been to the Microsoft KB and read several articles on "files opening slowly" and "trouble shooting damaged Word files" but have yet found anything that helps.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff Farrar

Usually this problem is a corrupt template, hence why you can cut n paste the original wordage into a new document and it behaves itself thereafter. Sorry, but you have already found the quickest fix!

Thanks for the help. 99% of our users were simply using a template, printing the form, and saing that data till the next time it was needed. I simply had them save the document{s} as a Word Doc, rather than a template, and everything works fine.

Thanks,

Jeff Farrar

If you now create a new template from that word doc, the problem should have vanished.