mxd opens slowly

Question

I have been having issues with opening ANY mxd in 10.1. The software itself opens fine, but if I try to open a mxd it takes a long time to load. I have tried deleting the normal.mxt and have tried creating different mxds and trying them, but it seems as though it takes a long time no matter what. It is not 'drawing' while I wait for it to load either, rather it just shows the little blue loading circle. Once the mxd is open it is fine as well. Any suggestions?

Thanks

RobertBorchert · Answer

Couple questions.

Have you upgraded your Database to 10.1?
How large are the  MXD's that you are trying to open?
Are you trying to open online sources?
Are you using MXD's that were created before 10.1?
Do you regularly compress your geodatabase?
Are you features in a Geometric Network and or in SDE?

In Windows Explorer navigate to your geodatabase.  How large is it?
Now in ArcCatalog compress your geodatabase.  Now how large is it?  If it went down dramatically you should see an increase in performance.

Open your windows explorer.  Right click on the properties for your hard drive.  How much space do you have left on  your hard drive?  If you have anything less than 10% you have space issues.  Does not really matter how large your hard drive is but what percentage is left is critical.  If you have less than 10% delete or uninstall anything you can then...

Run Disk Cleanup on  your hard drives.
Run Disk Defragmentor on your hard drives.

After compressing your database, running cleanup on your HDD and de-fragmenting your HDD are you still having issues?

If your MXD that you are using is very large (over 7mb) you may need to take steps to reduce it.

I have been having issues with opening ANY mxd in 10.1. The software itself opens fine, but if I try to open a mxd it takes a long time to load. I have tried deleting the normal.mxt and have tried creating different mxds and trying them, but it seems as though it takes a long time no matter what. It is not 'drawing' while I wait for it to load either, rather it just shows the little blue loading circle. Once the mxd is open it is fine as well. Any suggestions?

Thanks