Microsoft Office 2008 - spinning balls

Our office has come across an issue in the last few months that has us stymied. I'm hoping someone here may be able to offer assistance or direction. Sorry but the explanation is a bit lengthy...
Last summer, our office updated all of our machines to OS 10.7. We're running on iMacs that are about 4 years old now, and out of AppleCare. When we made the upgrades, there was a decision to not upgrade the version of Microsoft Office we were running (2008) since it would have meant an increase in the cost of the upgrades, and training time to get the staff up & running again. There was nothing we could find at the time that would indicate we'd have any issues sticking with Office 2008 in the new OS.
Shortly after the updates were run, two of our staff of 20+ started noticing problems with delays when opening Word documents from our XServe file server. When they used the Open menu and maneuvered through our file hierarchy, to chose a document, they would notice a spinning ball pop up for upwards of 15-30 seconds (I know it doesn't sound like much, but these are busy assistants, and typically open 50+ documents a day, so it adds up). Sometimes the ball would stick around for a minute or more. If they were trying to jump through multiple folders & sub-folders to locate where the documents were on the server, they'd sometimes encounter this behaviour in each sub-folder they drilled into.
To date we've tried everything we can think of... increased the RAM in those machines; updated the OS; updated Office; updated the RAM in the server hosting the information; uninstalled & reinstalled Office from the original CD; tested using a fresh account, with none of the other preferences; changed their network connection from wired to robust wireless; had them try opening files only directly through the Finder; installed & ran the Trial version of Office 2011... Nothing has fixed the issue.
We're all at a loss as to what to try next. I'm wondering if anyone has seen this issue, if they've resolved it, or if anyone has any suggestions for what to try next. We have only the two staff members experiencing the problem, but since they're such high producing assistants, we're trying to resolve the issue. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Jennifer Gabriel
Internal IT Support
Williams McEnery
Barristers & Solicitors
169 Gilmour Street
Ottawa, ON
K2P 0N8

Not the area to ask but...
A. backup
B. repair your drive from another hard drive also running latest OS X.
Sounds like your disk file system and directory are problem (the hard drive itself could be failing or have failed blocks too).

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Message was edited by: nerowolfe

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Not the area to ask but...
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Microsoft Office 2008 - spinning balls

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