Office 2007 slow in coherence mode

J

Jay Levitt

Member
Office 2007 is maddeningly slow in Coherence mode; it's fine in Single Window or Full Screen mode. To duplicate this, launch Excel 2007, and press "ALT" and then "H". On my machine, it can take 1-2 seconds just for it to finish drawing the keyboard tooltips on the ribbon.

I've verified with Activity Monitor that, when this happens, Parallels shoots up to 40-50% of the CPU on the Mac host side. No other process peaks during this time. I have plenty of memory. There is no noticeable CPU spike under Windows task manager.

Host: Mac Pro (early 2008), dual quad-core Xeon 3.2GHz, 16GB RAM, OS X 10.5.4, four-drive Cheetah 15K.5 RAID-10 array. 11GB is free when this happens.
Guest: Windows XP SP3
Parallels: Build 5608, memory limit "manually", 4392MB, pre-allocation is enabled

I have tried the following, with no effect:

- Decrease guest RAM from 2048MB to 512MB
- Enable DirectX shaders
- Close all other running programs
- Uninstall and reinstall parallels tools
- Disable Spaces

Other notes from John's usual checklist:
1. Memory: see above
2. Defrag: N/A; there is no significant disk activity when this happens, and no swapping
3. Adjust memory limit: N/A; already at the recommended settings
4. Themes: N/A; doesn't affect Office 2007, but I did try shutting the service down, and it had no effect
5. Coherence: yes, this is the fail case; it doesn't happen in Single Window or Full Screen mode
6. antivirus: N/A; no CPU usage when this happens
7. msconfig: N/A; no startup items are getting CPU
8. Remote connection: There are no remote connections involved
9. Optimize for best performance: again, doesn't affect Office 2007, but I did try it, and it had no effect
 
It looks like John's tales :)
Ok, let us try following

- Increase video memory to 64 mb
- Try to low Mac OS resolution
- Disable/Enable DirectX Shaders , check in both

The main problem is video memory lack, and additional CPU usage on second windows redrawing
(Office Ribbon)
 
No luck so far. I tried the following:

- Decrease video RAM from 32MB to 16MB
- Increase video RAM from 16MB to 64MB
- Lower Mac resolution from 1920x1200/millions to 1280x960/thousands
- Lower PC resolution from whatever Coherence had set it to (~1280x800 I think?) to 896x762
- Lower PC colors from 32-bit to 24- and 16-bit
- Disable write combining in PC driver
- Disable all hardware accelerations in PC driver

(I had already tried enabling/disabling Direct X 9 shaders in the original post)

In every case, the problem remained the same: tooltips draw almost instantly in "single window" mode, but very slowly in Coherence mode. Much of the time, you can see the shadows being drawn first, and then the tooltips. Pressing ALT again will erase the tooltips, even more slowly.

Does this happen on your machine too, John? i.e. is it something specific to my config, or a general bug that we're troubleshooting? Are there any troubleshooting/debugging utilities/modes I could enable? I am a developer.

I did just notice this error in the log, which seems to happen only when I'm in Coherence mode, and only when trying this fail case:

Jul 31 07:49:21 macpro [0x0-0x90090].com.parallels.desktop[50080]: Thu Jul 31 07:49:21 macpro.home.jay.fm Parallels[50080] <Error>: CGImageCreate: invalid image size: 0 x 0.

it repeats a few dozen times - maybe, say, one for each tool tip??
 
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