Yesterday I encountered a very strange behavior in Microsoft Office 2007. I was about to save a document I was working on in a particular folder in my D: drive, and I found that the save file dialog box was taking forever just to show me a list of folders in my D: drive.

Once that list loaded, it took equally long to show a list of subfolders within a particular folder I double-clicked on. This kept happening until I reached the folder in which I wanted to save my file.

It would take about a minute or two for the screen to display the contents of each subfolder. Frustrated by the delay, I did a quick search on Google and discovered that the delay can be caused by network drives which are not currently available.

I then realized the source of my problem. I had recently purchased a HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni color laser printer, which comes with a built-in memory card reader. The printer driver had automatically created a mapped network drive to the card reader on my computer with the drive letter X:.

Each time I would explore the folders on my computer through the file save dialog box, it would try to connect to the network drive. This was the cause of the delays! I right clicked on the mapped network drive and clicked on Disconnect, and voila, the file save as dialog box begun working speedily again.

Hopefully this will help you save time and frustration if you ever come across this problem. By the way the HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni is an excellent color laser printer which I purchased for RM 1200 from Sri Computers in Low Yat Plaza.