Office documents slow to open when on non-domain LAN.

Question

Our notebooks are all connected to our domain. When you open an MS Office document (Word, Excel, etc..), while in our domain, they open fast. They open fine on network shares and on the desktop.
When you are out of our domain, and try to open documents on your desktop, they open fast.
When you are out of our domain and connect to a wireless network (at home for instance) and try to open documents from your desktop, it is very slow.
When you connect to our domain from that wireless using VPN, the documents on your desktop open fast again.
It is just slow when you are out of the domain (no VPN connection) and on a network.

Answer 1

I agree that the problem is due to non existent printers and perhaps network file shares. Our users have 5 network shares mounted and at least 3 networked printes connected.
The printers show up as offline when outside of the domain and the shares show up as disconnected. When our notebook users are outside of the office and not connected to a network, documents open fast. The slowdown comes when our users are on a non-domain
network and when they are not VPN'd into our domain. For some reason MS Word and Excell checks for access to every printer and maybe file share when a network connection is present.
One of the things that we’ve done in the past is to create a little batch script that disconnects the networked drives for everyone. We could add the disconnection of printers
too, but that’s going to be too cumbersome for most of our users, because they will have to disconnect the drives and printers when they are out of the domain and not VPN’d in. Connect drives and printers when they are out of the domain and VPn’s in. Connect
printers when they are back in the office (drives are automatically connected via login script).
Now as for your suggestions.
#2 - Setting the last printer used for each application to a local one means that they will have to remember to do that whenever they take documents outside of the office. That’s
not good. I’ll get a lot of complaints if they have to do this for Office apps only. They don’t need to do this for any other application. They just drop those files on their desktop and they’ll open regardless of the network or printer status. I'll try setting
the default printer to the XPS Document writer or another local printer and see it that helps.
#3 – Removing all the prefetch files from c:\windows\prefetch folder is not an option. This folder can be accessed only by administrators. My users are not administrators, so
that is not an option.
Ideally, what I would like to do is to stop MS Office apps from checking network access when it opens. It seems to be able to do that when there is no network connection. I think
it should only check network access when there is a link to a network location inside the document.
Wolfgang