Word VBA script for reading only causes writes to SSD

[Mark_ITH]

So I have a script that is used to open word documents as read only and when the script runs, Word is creating/editing files in two specific folders as identified by resmon.

These folders are:

....\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.Word

....\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\UsageMetricsStore\FileActivityStore\Word

This isn't a huge problem but it is shortening the life of my SSD as I am read 100,000+ files. In just 3 days, the SSD life has shortened by 5%. I have over 1M documents to scan so this could total trash my SSD very quickly. In the last day, I ran a monitor and it shows over 700 GB of writing by WINWORD.EXE even though I am not saving any of the documents. This is only the data written in the above two folders and mostly the second folder.



Just wondering if there is a setting that I can use to prevent this. Thanks

[macropod]

Cross-posted at: Word VBA script for reading only causes writes to SSD | MS Answers
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[Guessed]

This is the first time I've ever seen this type of question so I've never considered it before. I'm also not sophisticated enough to run monitors on exe activities so you are way more advanced than me and I'll just ask a couple of questions that might lead you to a solution.

Do the temp files also get created if you open in READ mode but close without saving? I expect it just changes 'where' the temp file is created since you would get a ~temp file in the same directory as the document.

Can you change the script to read the xml contents of the docx zip file without using Word to open the file first?

[Mark_ITH]

I am opening the file as read only (never write) but the temp files are always created.

It might be possible to read the file with filestream but I am also using some of the Word APIs so that would not work for me.

I have been able to minimize the amount of writes with the above procedures so I think I am good for now but MS should really be cognizant of how much disk activity their software generates.