I have submitted this question to a few online discussion groups,
including the Microsoft Answers Community, and I have so far not
received any responses which were helpful. I'm posting it here in case
any of you have any ideas.
I have an odd issue which I can't seem to resolve and I'm hoping that
one of you might be able to help me think out of the box, so to speak,
for a possible solution.
First, I'm using a Dell Optiplex 740, 3 gb of ram and it formerly had
Windows 7 pro, 32-bit edition installed with Office 2013 as part of an
Office 365 subscription with NVDA as the screen reader. Everything was
working well, including my Office 2013 apps. Performance was good and
cursor movement commands behaved as you would expect.
To make a long story a bit short my computer contracted a virus which
crippled my system to the point where everything, including the OS,
needed to be reinstalled. The proprietor of the local computer shop who
did this for me installed the 64-bit edition of Windows. In a way, this
did me a favor as the 64-bit edition will allow me to eventually put
more RAM into this system at some point.
Anyway, here's where the problem comes in. I have two user accounts on
this computer. One is called Owner and is a standard user account where
I perform my day-to-day tasks. The other account is called Admin and is
where I do maintenance such as installing, removing or making major
modifications to software, backups, etc., etc.
In my regular Owner account there is noticeable sluggishness when moving
the cursor in a Word document. Examples: pressing right arrow reads the
next character but there is a noticeable pause before the character is
read. The same is true when moving by words and lines and even typing
echo produces a slight delay. This does not occur with Wordpad,
Thunderbird or with the virtual cursor in my Web browser. It does not
even seem to happen in Excel, only with Word.
I don't know what made me try this but I decided to try using Word with
the admin account. With this account, the sluggishness is nearly gone,
but still a tad bit noticeable.
This intrigued me and, of course, I tried to compare what might be
different in the two accounts but I can't find anything which fixes the
problem in my standard owner account. Interestingly, if I change the
window size from a maximized to a restored state the sluggishness is
decreased somewhat and is at least a bit less annoying but it's still
somewhat there. Also, changing the view settings from "print view" to
"draft view", along with changing the window size from being maximized
to being restored, improves performance to an acceptable level, though
not quite as snappy as what I get with programs such as Wordpad, and so
at least I can use this workaround for a degree of reasonable performance.
In the Word options dialog, Text animations is turned off and I even
played with the toggle of enabling or disabling using hardware graphics
acceleration.
I've done a repair in my copy of Office, both the quick repair and the
online repair and these changes have not helped. The names of the addins
look the same in both accounts.
I have even uninstalled and reinstalled Office 365, although I don't
know if uninstalling Office removes everything from the appdata folders
in the user folders and perhaps I should have done this after uninstalling.
I even saw an optional update to my Nvidia graphics adapter and ran that
update. That was a big mistake, as it seemed to have disabled the keys
to open the Start menu; the Windows key and ctrl-escape did not allow me
to open the start menu and the update didn't even fix my Word-related
issues. By using NVDA's object navigation keys, I was able to find the
start button and, once in the start menu, did a system restore to a time
shortly before that update was installed.
I even created a third profile on the system called "test", just to see
if something in my owner account was corrupted. Running Word on the test
profile did not fix these issues, whether the account was set with
standard or admin rights.
I'm considering removing NVDA, as well as the folder in my appdata
folder to clear out all settings and then reinstalling it.
I've tried every trick I know. Has anybody ever ran into this and can
you suggest any other things I could experiment with?
--
David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology Specialist
Feel free to visit my Web site
www.davidgoldfield.info
