Terminal Server 2008 – Slow File open dialog in Office 2003

In the interest of helping you resolve your problem here's a resolution I found at WordTips:

The only way she was able to get around the problem was to turn off the automatic backup file feature in Word (Tools | Options | Save tab, clear Always Create Backup Copy) while working in that document.

Have you considered implementing a real-time office document sharing plugin like DocVerse? Note: As this product is currently in beta it only supports PowerPoint but will support all Office docs in the future. I used it as an example for implementing a more integrated way of sharing docs across a network.

Also, this Read-Only hassle could be related to a network permissions issue as opposed to a document permissions issue since it involves files on the share. I'm assuming the user doesn't experience this issue when they save and edit files locally.

Turn off any scanning of "network drives" that the Symantec Antivirus software on the client computer allows. I've had some situations where I've seen the SAV 10 client generates gratuitous traffic when talking to a file server that didn't have SAV installed, because the option to scan "network drives" when the server didn't have SAV installed was enabled.

Sniffing the traffic is probably your best place to start, at this point. You might want to run Process Monitor on the client, as well, to see what it "thinks" it's doing.