When I try to open a new Microsoft Word 2000 template, I must wait 3 minutes to 5 minutes to receive the list of available templates from our network. Our file server has a 70GB hard disk with RAID 5 and NTFS compression enabled. Is the compression causing the delays?
Word 2000 and earlier versions are slow to enumerate the templates in large template directories on network drives. I've even experienced lag times on my network, on which the file server's network connection and disk subsystem are extremely fast. The only real solution is to put as many of the templates as possible on each user's local file system and limit the number of templates that you store on the network drive.