Windows 7 Clients and Latency-Slowness Saving to and Accessing Network Files

We recently had an issue with a client site after deploying several Apple iMacs running Bootcamp with Windows 7 x64.  The environment includes two file servers, one housing the mapped shared drive and redirected Desktop and My Documents and the other housing flat files for a company specific application with a fat client installed locally and the clients access the files on the second file server.  The shared drive and redirected homes is a Windows Server 2008 x64 (original release) patched to SP2 with all updates and the application specific file server is Windows Server 2003 x64.

Usually after 15 - 60 minutes of operation the clients would experience significant latency in opening network files or saving to the network locations.  We tried lots of things short of turning off redirected folders, including disabling offline folder syncing.

I eventually stumbled across this thread on the Technet site and toward the bottom is a post by camelCasus that mentions this:

Clients are a mix of WinXP and Win 7 and Office 2003/2007/2010 in all possible combinations (except 2010 on WinXP) and experienced serious delays in opening and often also closing of Word and Excel files not matching the expected speed of the setup with GBit ethernet all over.

For the Win 7 clients with Office 2007/2010 solution was this (turning on the Web Client) in combination with switching off indexing of off-line files as suggested by James Nelson.

For the Win 7 clients with Office 2003 and WinXP clients, this didn't change much (for WinXP the Web Client was already set to Automatic). However, turning off OFV (Office File Validation) made the trick. This is explained here next to the bottom:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg985445%28office.12%29.aspx

<quote>

To prevent Office File Validation from validating files you must create the following registry key and assign it a value of “0” for the specified application in Office 2003 or Office 2007:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\<11.0 or 12.0>\<application>\Security\FileValidation, where <11.0 or 12.0> represents the version of Office and where <application> represents the specific Office application for which Office File Validation is installed, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

All necessary parameters for configuring the registry key are listed as follows:

• Value: EnableOnLoad

• Type: REG_DWORD

• Default: 2

• Description: Disable Office File Validation

• 0 = Don’t validate

• 1 = Validate

• 2 = Validate unless called via object model

 

</quote>

For Office 2010 replace the key above (11.0 or 12.0) with 14.0

Thanks for all the contributions to this thread! I can't imagine how I otherwise should have come across the Web Client and indexing of off-line files.

/gustav

I then enabled Automatic start up of the Web Client service on the affected computers and created a GPO covering the parent OU of the relevant computers to disable offline folder indexing.

The initial reports are good from the users.

Interestingly, we support several environments with Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit clients) and varying servers from 2003 to 2008R2 and in only one have we encountered this.