Explorer View is too slow

The explorer view feature is one that is VERY popular with end users AND it provides perhaps this simplest way to "Bulk Load" content into SharePoint, when it works, it works really well, however when it doesn't, getting to the bottom of why can be a real pain.

I had IE7 and office 2007 installed. When I opened a document straight from SharePoint it took too much time, even when I opened a document library in Explorer view it also took too much time. I also tried by right clicking on an Explorer view also took too much time to give me the menu.

There are a few causes and solutions for this:

• Ports 137, 138, 139 and 445 are blocked, and ICMP is not.


• The server is being accessed using a name other than its configured NetBIOS or Fully Qualified Domain Name. This occurs most often in load balancing and extranet scenarios.


• WebDAV is trying to use a proxy to access a server on the local network.


• Running any antivirus like OfficeScan or Trend Micro or Panda Antivirus.

I went as far a reinstalling office 2007 and even installed IE8 RC1 and the problems persisted. I then ran a registry an file trace on my PC to try and figure out what was happening and noticed a lot of TCPIP related info, but no luck.

The lack of performance seems to be related to a setting in Internet Explorer: under Tools, Internet Options, Connections, LAN Settings, you need to uncheck automatically detect settings. This magically increases the speed of your Explorer View, but what is even better: drastically decreases the load time of Office documents when opening them from SharePoint.

See this article to Troubleshooting the SharePoint Explorer View:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c523ac7a-5724-48be-b973-641e805588f4&displaylang=en