Applications taking 40 seconds to open

[dbsurfer]

I have the latest version of Office 2021 installed on a Dell Latitude laptop running Windows 10 version 20H2. All Office applications were running perfectly until the latest cumulative updated for Windows 10 KB5005565 was installed last night. After a restart I tried to open TextMaker and it now takes nearly 40 seconds to appear. Initially a blank window is drawn and then the activity icon circulates for 40 seconds before the application appears after which it behaves normally. All other Office applications are the same. I made no other changes to my laptop configuration yesterday.

I tried uninstalling and re-installing Office, including renaming the User\...\Documents\SoftMaker folder beforehand but it made no difference. I uninstalled the Windows update - no difference, and finally I uninstalled and re-installed Office again - no difference.

This problem reminds me of an issue I had a few weeks ago when I experimented with network shares. If any of the shared drives were unavailable because the relevant PC was switched off, this caused a similar delay. I deleted the network shares and the problem disappeared.

My desktop computer is running the same version of Windows and Office and includes the same Windows update, but is not exhibiting this problem.

I installed FreeOffice alongside Office 2021 and it behaves the same way.

I presume it is related to a timeout issue. Does anyone have any suggestions for a solution to the problem?

[miguel-c]

Go to "? | About | Write system info"
Then analyze generated file (sminfo.txt) and see what's causing the delay.
You may also post the file here for us to analyze.

[dbsurfer]

Thanks very much, miguel-c for replying. The contents of sminfo.txt were very informative. The problem was due to an inaccessible network printer which I had used during the same session as the installation of the Windows update. The latter had nothing to do with it. I normally have Microsoft Print to PDF selected in the printer box and had not changed it back after using the network printer. Consequently, when I next used the application it tried to check the presence of the printer which was no longer available and hence the long delay while it waited for a reply.

So this is an identical issue to the problem I had previously with inaccessible network shares which I referred to in my original post. I may have solved the problem but I feel the need to comment on this situation. Other similar applications which I use do not behave like this and their start-up is not affected by inaccessible network devices/ links. I would expect that an application would only check for an external device when the user specifically initiates a communication with that device at which point there would be a delay and an error message if the device/link was unavailable. In this situation you would immediately know what the problem was whereas with Office you have no idea, as there are no messages during application initialisation.

I now know how to analyse the problem but I would like to suggest a change to the Office applications so that they communicate with the user when situations like this occur and don't leave non-expert users like me in the dark wondering what is going on. Alternatively, don't make these checks at start-up.

[martin-k]

The Windows API has no non-blocking functions to connect to printers. We have already checked.

We are considering always falling back to the Windows default printer every time you start our applications, under the assumption that your default printer should usually be accessible. With the latest Windows 10 change that the last-used printer automatically becomes the default printer, the behavior would be pretty close to identical to now, only that a forgotten printer doesn't block the applications.

[Woody44]

We are considering always falling back to the Windows default printer every time you start our applications, ...

PLEASE make that change!