[Technical] Help Request - XP+Office extreme slowness

[Keith Richardson]

Hi Everyone.
We are frustrated here because our beautiful new XP machines are slowing
down whenever we are in MS-Office (as explained below).
Any suggestions or solutions will be greatfully received! (Changing to
Openoffice is not a possibility, Con.)
Thank you.

We have Novell servers with plain old boring print queues installed and
only Administrators have more than just print to rights to these print
queues and printers. On the workstations that  we have XP Professional
installed with either Office 2000 or Office 2003 where this probem
exists, when a user tries to print or change the page format in Word /
Excel etc the PC takes a very long time (upto 3 minutes) to respond and
then states that the printer is not responding do You wish to wait or
continue regardless?for both.
 
I have also seen this on one PC connected directly to the printer via
LPT when the printer is in standby / powersave mode.
 
All W2K & W98 O/S machines are not having this problem.
 
SUMMARY: So does anyone know how to stop XP-Pro from trying to query the
printer
every time you want to change anything apart from the text of your
letter.

Warm regards,
Keith
Keith Richardson
Leibler Yavneh College
Elsternwick Ph (03)9528 4911
keithcr at fastmail.fm