Access slow to open

Copper Contributor

I have 4 HP laptops - all configured identically with Win-10 Home updated fully to current 1903 plus all have Office 365 under a single Microsoft Account Subscription (so all identical). The laptops range from 2 years old to brand new. The faulty one in question (below) is 12 months old.

 

With one of those laptops (only), of the 4 ways I know of to open a database file, 2 of them take anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. The other 2 ways of opening a database file each take 1 to 2 seconds. the 4 ways are as follows:

  1. Open Access and select the file by browsing or from the list of recent files opened (FAST)
  2. From an already open Access database, execute code to open another DB (FAST)
  3. From Windows Explorer, double-click the DB file (SLOW)
  4. Right-Click the Access icon on the task bar and select a previously pinned file (SLOW)

It seems to me that the first two are using MS Access to open an Access file, whilst the other two are using Windows to open the Access file. So I suspect that the problem is actually in Windows, not Access.

 

The problem only started a few weeks ago, so up till then on that PC there was no issue, so it looks like an update issue, but it is only affecting one of the 4 laptops. The other 3 have no trouble at all in opening DB files by any of the 4 methods above.

 

I have spent about 14 hours on the phone with both Office and Windows support staff (level 1 and 2 and also the S/W development team) over the last several weeks, but none of them has been able to resolve the issue.

 

In the process they have completely reinstalled Office 365 and completely reinstalled Win-10. Neither action worked. They also set up a separate local account on the laptop, but when logged in under that new user name, the problem still existed.

 

The support team has now given up and asked me to seek help from this community. I find that startling, to say the least: can't Microsoft fix a technical issue in one of its installations? That is unbelievable!

 

But, here I am - seeking help. Does anyone have any bright ideas? 

 

The reason it is so important for me is that I earn my living by designing and building MS Access DB solutions for small business people to manage their businesses. I have been doing that for over 20 years. And to have to wait 5 minutes (instead of 2 seconds) for a system to open is unacceptable. And sometimes the methods that work fast are not appropriate (like when I need to hold the shift key down as I double-click the file in the Windows Explorer list).

 

Any help and/or suggestions would be most welcome. Please don't be concerned if I don't answer you immediately. I am in Sydney Australia, which is a different time zone to most of the people using this service, I would guess.

 

 

23 Replies

@StevenED1964 

Apologies if you have already mentioned this but are you using a split database? If so, your second instance may be using the original as a persistent connection which would definitely improve performance.

@StevenED1964 

I think this issue that you have experience is from the office update from last week of Jan 2022 or first week of Feb 2022. 

Wherein some of the access accdb runs in the background in the first run,

it got recently fix update last week.

Hopefully your office got the latest update and fix it ;)

 

Regarding with the emulator that I have a problem before was Bluestacks and I switch to LDPlayer to solve my issue :)

Well, it seems like this issue has resurfaced earlier this week. My all databases are now taking 10-15 seconds to open the splash screen. It used to be immediate . Same behavior with a local non-split with no contents - new database. I checked the updates history. KB5013942 was installed on May 12th, I started experiencing this issue around that time too.

@CustomMadeDB 

I finally found a solution. After several clean installs, this problem would always return sooner or later.

 

The solution was to uninstall or disable (Quit) DropBox.