Fix severe delays when loading Excel 2003 files from network drives

I was recently made aware of a problem where Excel 2003 would take several minutes to load a spreadsheet from a network drive. What made it even worse was that several of these sheets were referenced inside a CAD drawing (meaning AutoCAD would open Excel in the background for each spreadsheet referenced), and the load delay for each individual spreadsheet made it was near-impossible for the drawing to ever finish loading.

I found three possible solutions to the problem.

The first (which I used) was to create or modify the following registry key using regedit:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Excel\Security\FileValidation]
"EnableOnLoad"=dword:00000000

The second option is to uninstall the Microsoft Office File Validation Add-in from the Control Panel.

The third is to upgrade to Excel 2007 or later.

Word 2003 crashing when trying to format lists

One of our users was having Word crash on her every time she accessed the Bullets and Numbering… function in Word. The problem seemed intermittent at first but eventually became 100% consistent. We checked Office Update but the site reported that we were all up to date on that front, so there was no possibility of downloading an update that might fix the problem. An internet search uncovered a solution to the problem, the problem being a corrupt "List Gallery". When you access the Bullets and Numbering… function, Word shows you a gallery of list styles so you can preview them all and pick the one you want. Over time, Word tries to adapt this gallery so that the defaults match the styles you most frequently use. However, this adaptive behaviour is kind of flaky and poorly implemented, so if you are working on a lot of documents from a bunch of different people and spend a lot of time fixing broken and mis-formatted lists (as this user often does), the gallery itself eventually fills up with the broken and mis-formatted list styles you happen to be working on. In this case it got so bad that Word itself couldn't even handle the garbage and it crashed every time it had to display the list gallery. To fix the problem (source):

1. Open Registry Editor (go to Start, click Run, and type regedit)
2. Navigate down to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\List Gallery Presets key (What look like folders in the Registry are actually called keys)
3. Right click on the List Gallery Presets key and Delete it

When you next start word, click the Format menu and choose Bullets and Numbering — the List Gallery will now display with all the simple, clean defaults it had when you first installed Word.