This one may stump you, it sure the hell has stumped me.

The office where I work is running a terminal server with neoware thin clients for about 13 users (the rest are on actual puters). Now, aside from the normal annoying performance, we're having real issues with WordPerfect in particular. It is unreasonably slow..freezing up, stuttering, and taking from 5-15 minutes to print at times. Rebooting the terminal server will clear things up with WP for a day or two..but inevitably it gets borked again.

I could reboot it everyday, but inevitably someone is working on it (many folks VPN and work from home), and people don't log off (I haven't really figured out how to automate a reboot for the terminal server without it getting hung up asking me if I want to kick people off

In the end, its not that urgent because we're switching to Word at the end of the year, as soon as we can get someone in to train the staff. (I swear the legal profession is the last bastion of WordPerfect).

Anyone have suggestions for how to fix the problem itself, or how I can automate a reboot?

Well, I would pull up Task Manager on the Terminal Server(s) and find out what is choking resources at the very least.

I am sure there are a ton of performance MMCs in the new Terminal Server.


It is likely that it may be a bunch of Virtual Dos Machines which never get closed, and are tying it up.

The resources are fine. Rarely more than half the memory being used at any given time. Its WordPerfect. I just don't know why or how to fix it heh.

Maybe WordPerfect uses some sort of shared scratch file which is machine specific rather than user specific. Or, maybe it's thinking its scratch file is across the network somewhere.

Hmm, that might explain it, if WP is trying to push much of anything to these clients, its going to create issues. Their mighty 32M of RAM can't handle jack.

That should be configurable, I would assume....

I'll be damned if I can figure out how. I'll keep looking though.

The symptom of the computer slowing down over time with a reboot fixing it usually means some sort of resource is being used up. If you are sure that it's just Word Perfect (you've tried running other applications when Word Perfect is slow) and you've tried shutting down Word Perfect and starting it again the problem is probably somewhere in the interaction between the system and Word Perfect.

I suspect there might be some task or document that is causing a process to hang in they system. It might be a document with a macro that can't run on open so it gets stuck. It could be a corrupted document that is trying to print. Ideally, you could test this by picking a terminal, opening Word Perfect and letting it sit for a few days untouched to see if the problem repeats.

If all else fails, you might try reinstalling the Word Perfect client on the terminal.

I've tried reinstalling Word Perfect on the terminal server, hoping that the previous tech guys had simply botched the job somehow. It didn't really work. Nothing actually gets installed on the terminal clients themselves, they are just flash boxes.

Honestly, I'm beginning to think its something to do with the fact that we're not running Citrix. No idea why they decided not to, but at this point I'm not going to drop the cash to get Citrix when I can spend the money phasing out these POS Neoware clients and putting in actual computers again.

That's a good idea, however, about running WP on a terminal unused for a few days to see if it gets hinky. I could see a third program with which we do document merges causing part of the problem.

That sounds like something for Nick Burns your company's computer guy! (SNL thx)