"Contacting the server for information. Press ESC to cancel." in Excel when opening

Question

I havea user that when she open an Excel file that is older format 97-2003 it just says "Contacting the server for information. Press ESC to cancel." in the status bar then it hangs.  If she press esc about 20 times she get to see the
document but then Excel just hangs and is unresponsive. I dont know if the documents have some connection to template but the user says they dont. Is there any way to disable this behavior ?
I have searched everywhere for a solution but everything is about Word or Outlook and none of those can be applied to Excel.

Answer 1

We had the same issue, however counting for all Office applications including Access.
Thus, something told me this couldn't be application specific, which ruled out the dozens of suggestions you can browse to solve this issue, including removing of printer drivers, Share Point access (we have no SP running), plug-ins, malformed normal.dot,
wrong Registry entries, etc. Antivirus and firewall had also temporarily been disabled with no change.
Also, network shares were marked as "safe" and included as trusted locations.
What pointed to the solution was this:
1. When a trusted location was added in, say, Word, the path, say, T:\Documents was automatically changed to the shared path of our DFS file servers:
\\ourdomain.local\data\department\data\document
2. When I logged in with my Domain Admin account, the issue did not exist.
Thus, it had to do with permissions.
Users had full rights to the network share, here T:\Documents.
They also had read/write rights to the DFS _share_. However, they had no Active Directory rights to the root of DFS, \\ourdomain.local
Adding Domain Users with browse and read rights to
\\ourdomain.local solved the issue at once.
/gustav
Gustav Brock