Excel – Microsoft Office 2003 document (Excel and Word), intermitently, takes 30 seconds to load

I am trying to figure out why a simple .XLS EXCEL workbook is taking, randomly, 30 seconds to open.

Before answering:

Please, bear mind the following:

Main symptoms

Using Windows Explorer, here is a more accurate sequence:

1. I double-click on an EmptyWorkbook.xls;
2. Nothing seems to happen;
3. Navigation on folder becames imediately unresponsive after the double-click;
4. After a delay between 30 seconds and 1 minute, window becames responsive and it starts a regular document loading, which after 1 second, present EXCEL splash screen e so on.
5. If, during hang, I stop printer spooler service, document is loaded immediately.

Other symptoms

• The problem consistently does not occur whenever Printer Spooler is stopped.
• Disabling network cable ceases problem;
• During hanging here is no cpu or disk activity;
• It only happens during document load. Every runs smooth after that;
• Windows Explorer.exe hangs on folder, but all other folders, system and applications are still responsive;
• There are no consecutive hangings. I have to wait for while to reproduce this behaviour;
• All samples documents are located on a local drive (C:\BPI);
• The document has has macros and have any addins usage;
• The problem does not occur on others files extensions like .PDF, for example;
• Office 2003 is being used for several years;
• The computer is running Windows XP;
• Computer has several network mapped drives, all addressed to main file server;
• Recently, main fileserver was replaced by Windows 2011 SBS Standard Edition

What I have done so far

• I have traced machine Explorer.exe, using Process Monitor, added Duration column, and filtered by Duration > 1. For further information, please refer to Oliver Salzburg tutorial.
• Using Process Monitor, I have also figured out than five operations were taking most of sample collecting duration. Looking at sample image below, column Operation below you will notice that one single operation was taking 29 seconds;
• I have tried different documents (.xls and .doc), all of them smaller than 30 KB;
• I have, temporarily, removed all shortcuts on User Document's folder that were pointing to network drives or shares;
• I have runned CCleaner to fix registry issues;
• I made sure that there were no external links on tested workbook or word documents;
• I have checked if %PATH% was referencing any mapped network driver;
• I have reproduced this behaviour for hours;
• I have extensivelly researched for hours on the web;