Excel 2007 Slow Opening File

Question

We were looking at migrating to Office 2007. To verify compatibility, several key users have loaded Office 2007 on their machines. There seems to be several problems related to opening files in Excel.
If Excel is open and the user does a File/Open, files will open quickly. However, if the user clicks on a file to open it, it can take up to a minute to open. I found a fix for this on this forum. It is to add "%1" to the end of the Open command line in the defined file types for XLS files. After this worked, I found that also needs it for the New on XLT, Open for XLSX, New on XLTM, and New XLTX files.
After adding in the above fix I wanted to verify that it worked correctly by recreating the problem so I went in and removed the "%1" from all of the commands. When I tried to open a file, I got an error. So I went back into the File Types and checked the command lines. Now all of the command lines had a %1 at the end of them without the quotation marks. When I would try to delet this %1, it would now allow me to. I could remove it but when I reopened the line, it was back again. If I added the "%1" back to the end of the line it would take that and it would fix the problem again but I was still unable to remove the %1 from the other commands such as New, Print, Save As, etc. I had to Restore my system in order to remove them.
Further testing on the fix reveals that when I file is opened, it attempts to open the file twice. The first time it opens very quickly and then a minute later it opens the second time. Notice that this is the same delay that was experienced previously. It you open the file and make a change before the minute has elapsed, then you get a message stating that the file is already open and if you open it again you will lose your changes. This is probably due to the Use DDE being selected. But If I turn off DDE, then when I click on the first file, it opens quickly and when I click on the second file, it also opens quickly but if I look at the Task Manager, their are 2 copies of Excel running. If I go to the View tool bar in either copy of Excel and try to view the other window, I can not. So it appears that there physically 2 copies of Excel running. When I went back into the File Types, the Use DDE that I had unselected before is now checked again but the DDE command line is blank.
Thinking that may this was something that was surely fixed now that it is 2008 and the software is 2007, I looked for updates and found that IT had not run the updates. Loaded the Compatibility Pack and Service Pack 1 and high hopes that this would correct the problems. After loading the updates, I found that the File Types had reverted back to their original form without the "%1". Now I was really excited. Why would they reset user changes unless they fixed something related to them? To my dismay, the slow startup was back. I had to go back and set the "%1" back into all of the proper command lines.
As of now, my recomendation to IT is to stay as far away from Office 2007 as possible until Microsoft gets their act together.
By the way...I have tried all of the other recomendations from Microsoft about Excel being slow to start. They make a difference of less than 1 second. They also only make the App start quicker. They are not related to clicking on a file to open it.

Answer 1

I didn't seem to get much help from this forum but I will pass on the fix that I have found.
The problem doesn't have anything to do with the %1 fix that everyone is using. All that does is to open the file before Excel is fully started. In particular, before the add-ins are opened.
You can verify this by changing the command line in the File Types to use a /s parameter which will bypass loading the add-ins.
What I found was that even though I had removed the Adobe AcrobatMaker add-in, the file PDFMaker.xla was still in the XLSTART folder and was being loaded.
Since Office now has it's own PDF functionality, this is no longer needed. I did however want to keep Acrobat so that I could print PDFs from other applications and edit PDF files so I wanted to keep it. Just not in Office.
Here are the steps to remove PDFMaker from Excel.
Choose Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs.
Select Acrobat Professional and click Change/Remove.
Click Next.
Select Modify and click Next.
Expand the Create Adobe PDF menu, then select the Acrobat PDF Maker option, and change the status to "This feature will not be available".
Click Next, and then click Finish to complete the process and allow Acrobat to remove the PDFMaker component. Note: You need the installation disk to do this.
After completing this process, it is interesting that it disabled but did not remove the PDFMaker.xla add-in. It is therefore necessary to remove it manually by exploring to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\XLSTART and manually deleting PDFMaker.xla.
Now for those of you who have already tried the "%1" fix and found that it causes new problems and doesn't fix things, you may have already found out that when you try to remove the "%1" from the File Type Open command line, something puts it back in as %1 without the quotation marks. This causes errors when you open a document that has spaces in it's path such as unable to open C:\Documents.xlsx, Unable to open And.xlsx, unable to open Settings.xlsx. No matter how hard you try, you cannot remove the %1.
So here is 2 ways to overcome this.
You can change the parameter from %1 to "%10". This will work as long as you don't try to open 10 files at the same time.
Or you can edit your registry and remove the %1. The easiest way I found was to open the registry editor and search for excel.exe" /e %1. Notice that this is the end of the command line. When I found it, I removed the %1. If you edited more than just the Open command for XLS files, you will need to keep searching until you remove all of the changes. This will get you back to where you were before you tried the "%1" fix.
There may be other add-ins that cause similar problems. Look in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\XLSTART folder to see what is really getting loaded.