yeah i hate it, i use 03 too but i have to use 07 at college and out machines have 512 of ram SLOOOOOW

What version of Powerpoint do you have in home and in work?. I am using powerpoint 2000 and its working ok but not faster when your using newer version.

Both work and home came with Office 2003.

CPU Intel Pentium IV 1.79 GHz
RAM 384 MB
HD 40 GB, 30GB used

Like I said, I don't think this is a system capability problem, because I can speed it up by clicking on the the unfilled thumbnail boxes.

I just read all of these threads relating to the problem of why PowerPoint Design Templates load so slowly. Has anyone actually figured out why this is, or is everyone still guessing? I really could use some help with this problem. Thanks!

I also have Office 2003 and am experiencing the same problem. I would appreciate it if someone has a workable solution other than the typical SPYWARE/MALWARE/MEMORY excuses.

I'm working on an IBM T43 with 1Gb RAM and over 10Gb of space on my hardrive (with no viruses or malware of any kind) on a corporate network. This is an obvious problem with the program itself and not a hardware issue.

I too can click on the thumbnail and have it load immediately but left alone the program takes up to 5 minutes to load all the previews. Are these being loaded from the web? Aren't they stored on the resident harddrive?

It's nice to know I'm not the only one experiencing the frustration but it sounds like this is a very rare problem- any ideas would be appreciated by us.

TwisterChaser,

Thanks for joining my search for a solution to this PowerPoint problem. Since my posting, no one has responded with a fix. This seems to be a difficult problem to solve. I think my frustration with it came through in my request for assistance. I apologoze for that. You seem to have articulated the problem far more reasonably than I did. Let's hope someone answers with a solution. Good luck.

Tech1Trainer

here is a work around defrag the HDD. and this is due to the compression thats on the .WMF files and your catalog file might be damaged. try reinstalling office and set everything to run from your hard drive.when you are done open power pint and run the clip organizer and compact each category.

You have a minimal amount of RAM, a slow (ish) CPU and your HD is getting full.
I didn't hear a reply to my suggestion about chkldsk and defrag, so I sort of lost interest.
Is your copy of PP up to date?

SP3 is most recent for 2003

I have installed all of the upgrades.

I have checked to see if it is some kind of computer overload, and it is not. CPU usage is minimal, the hard drive light flashes just before each thumbnail loads, and there is no internet traffic. It's almost as though someone put a timer in there to slow this down.

Defraging the disk is just a guess. I defragged it a few months ago. But if the disk were fragmented, the disk access light would be on all the time. It is not.