Office 2003 hangs on save or save as

Apparently, this is not a new problem. New for me though with Win7 RC.

When you try to save a document or 'save as' and click on the pulldown box to select location the program hangs or hangs for several minutes.

For me, the issue was unavailable network drives. Having a laptop for home and work I have different drives mapped for the networks, and subsequently one of the network drives would be 'unavailable'. It appears Office programs search around for available locations and hang when a network drive is not connected properly. Disconnecting the unavailable mapped drives will solve the problem. Unfortunately, they would have to be re-mapped as available.

Instead of re-mapping drives all of the time I created a batch file using this websites guidelines http://msmvps.com/blogs/kwsupport/ar.../22/63745.aspx and placed it into the startup folder. Works like a charm, and fixed the issue, as the batch file will not create an unavailable network drive.

Thanks for the heads up, I'm sure this will be of use to someone having the same problem