Slow Office file opening

Office 2007 was supposed to be better and faster compared to earlier versions but its been a week now I have installed office 2007 Professional suite on my Windows XP SP2. Whenever I try to open any office file it takes about 30 to 40 seconds to launch completely. And at the same time if I click Menu or Ctrl + O, then it opens the same file immediately.

Can anyone please provide me any solution for the same?

As per your post, am I right if I say you get the problem only while double clicking the files? If yes, then it is the problem of DDE which can be easily fixed by re-installation of Office suite. So go ahead and re-install and if you don’t want to re-install then follow these steps to fix it out:

Open Control Panel > Folder Options > File Types. Here scroll down and select (DOC for Word files) or XLS (for Excel files), click Advanced, select Open entry, click the edit Button. Now uncheck "Use DDE" and then put your cursor in the Application box,
arrow all the way to the right and put in "%1" (include the quote marks), IF there is /dde remove it.

That’s it. You are done.

Hey even I’m facing the same problem with Office Enterprises. Can you please tell if there is any way we can just disable DDE through a group policy or globaly on a system without having to change one file extension at a time per machine? If yes, please let me know more about the same.

I am not sure if it can be disabled from Group Policy but if it is installed on your computer you can get some help around in the registry in this location

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Word.Document.12\shell\New\command

Bump- Having the same issue with Windows 7 Professional, Office Pro Plus 2007. Same story, if I open word/excel and navigate to file, it opens right up. Problem is with double clicking a document - it takes sometimes as much as 15-20 seconds to open. Have tried repair install of Office, disabling ALL anti-virus/firewall, turning off wireless, logging off network- all to no avail. Just switched from XP where I was able to use the DDE fix, but cannot access that in 7.