win xp word, excel 20 second delay

[nuts]

Yesterday I went to troubleshoot an office network.

It's 2 identical Dell desktops 3 months old, 2 Gb processor, 256 Mb ram, networked through a router that feeds to a dsl line.

One machine was having trouble with the printer, and trouble shutting down. I dropped everything out of startup, and that machine works fine.

The other machine was hanging on excel, word and mspub operations. I reinstalled windows xp twice, reinstalled office xp three times. Of course, deleted everything from startup, ran a virus check.

It's better, but there is exactly a 20 second delay (20 seconds every time) in the following operations:

1. starting wordpad
2. starting ms pub
3. ms word starts ok, you can type, but as soon as you select text, or click the font selection, or click the bold button, you get the 20 second delay
4. excel starts ok, you can type in cells, adjust the size of rows and columns, but when you select a cell then click the font selector or the bold button, you get a 20 second delay -- you can format cells for everything else except font attributes without the delay

The delay happens once, then the program works normally.

I get the feeling that it's checking out the list of fonts, or looking for something somewhere it can't find.

I tried deleting most of the fonts (there are about 200, but the other computer has the same fonts and it has no delay). No change.

Notepad, this version, lets you change the font. As always, notepad is blazing fast, no delay on fonts or anything.


There were some shared files with the other computer, the client said the problem dated from when they setup file sharing. The shared files were on the other computer's hard drive. I eliminated all of that (I think), and stopped any file sharing. Did I miss something? Are the ms programs trying to access something on the network?

Also ran a winxp services tweak, setting a lot of services to manual start. No change.

Any ideas on what could be causing a 20 second delay?

Thanks

Mike