Slow file access in Excel and Word 2007?

In the past couple of months, I've come across a couple of instances of otherwise well-performing PCs exhibiting very long pauses while opening, via double-click, Excel and Word files in the more common .XLS and .DOC formats. And when I say slow, we're talking over a minute to open a small 20 - 30 kb file, while a 5 MB PDF opens instantaneously.

Well, today I found a resolution in a Google Groups posting and also here. These both reference Excel specifically; however, the same procedure works for Word, too - in this case, replace the "/dde" parameter at the end with "%1". There is a slight difference in the two articles - the second one leaves the "/e" parameter in place. I tried with that, and the fix worked.

In fact, after I had applied the changes, Word and Excel opened so fast, it was hard to believe just how much of a change there was. It really beggars belief that this problem wasn't picked up during product testing by Microsoft.