Office 2007: Initializing the Places Bar

In Office applications, when you initiate a Save As command, you may experience a window that pops up and says "Initializing the Places Bar". During this time, it can take a a few seconds to a few minutes to bring up the Save As window that you're expecting to see.

What is happening is the Office application, whether it be Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, is trying to find any network drives that you have mapped. If it can find the network drives, then this process will be fast. However, if it can't find the network path, then the process have to time out and then the Save As dialog box will come up. If you have multiple network drives that can't be reached, this can take a very frustratingly long time to time out and complete.

To correct this:

• Make sure that all of your network drives are able to be accessed. If they can't be accessed, you'll want to disconnect the drive or make sure that it's accessible.
  
• If you have group policy in place, then you'll want to review your policies and make sure that there are no places bar locations that can't be accessed. You'll need to have your systems administrator, or whoever manages your group policy look at this, but it can be found in the Group Policy Management Editor under User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Classic Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office 2007 system > File Open/Save dialog box > Places Bar Locations.

In my environment, we had an entry in group policy for the Places Bar Location that pointed to a server that no longer existed. Once that key was disabled and the changes were reflected on all of the domain controllers, I rebooted my system and the Save As command ran lightning fast.