Resetting a slow Visio

[Yacine]

I've got Visio on my work computer and I connect to my company via VPN.

When VPN is off Visio is just "normally" fast.
When VPN is ON, it takes more than 5 Minutes to load a file.
It is not an Internet thing, since other office apps act just fine when VPN is enabled.

It looks like Visio is searching for something on the company server, not finding it and re-trying a certain number of times.

A simple re-installation did not help. Most of the previous settings were unchanged after.

Do you guys have tips on how to clean an installation or make a deep re-installation?

[Visisthebest]

Thank you for sharing, because others might have this issue too.

[Nikolay]

Do you have something in stencils or templates? Here I mean:

[Yacine]

@Nikolay,
In the fresh Visio there were indeed folder settings of a previous installation.
I left only the folder MyStencils and I can confirm it is indeed much faster.  A little over a minute where it took 6 previously.
That really helped. Thank you very much.

I still wonder where Visio got all the old settings. They must be in the registry. But I don't dare messing with it.

[Nikolay]

The issue is, on startup, Visio indexes all files in those directories, including subdirectories. If these contain a lot of files, or the access to those is slow, that may cause a significant slowdown. These settings are just stored in your user profile, therefore not reset by reinstallation. Even if you have settings like above, that will scan all your "Documents" folder (including all subfolders) on startup. The registry key where the settings stored, is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Visio\Application

In fact, you can delete the whole "Visio" folder there for resetting your user settings
(you can also export it if you want a backup), it will be re-created. I'd say it's pretty safe.

Just to see the effect of those folders on performance, you could try putting C:\ (root drive) there for example, that will last forever

BTW, Visio discovers its own stencils using a different (much faster) method - registration, it does not scan the drives to look for them.
I also try to avoid putting anything in those fields considering performance..