Decreased performance when you add or move shapes that are contained in a Visio 2007 or a Visio 2003 drawing that is hosted in the Visio 2003 ActiveX Control

In Microsoft Office Visio 2007 and Microsoft Office Visio 2003, if you work with a drawing that is hosted in the Microsoft Office Visio 2003 ActiveX Control, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

• If the drawing that is hosted in the Visio 2003 ActiveX Control contains shapes that use gradient patterns or other custom properties, it takes a longer time to perform certain operations than if you modify the drawing directly in the Visio 2003 program. For example, if the drawing contains many shapes from stencils that are part of the Network solution, performance may decrease when you add new shapes to the drawing or move existing shapes in the drawing.
• When you open a drawing by using the Visio 2003 ActiveX Control, you may experience decreased performance when you perform actions on shapes that require a redraw operation of the shape. For example, you may experience slower performance when you do any one of the following:
  • Copy or move a shape
  • Add a shape to the drawing page
  • Zoom in or zoom out on a shape

This problem occurs if both of the following conditions are true:

• The drawing contains many shapes.
• The drawing contains one or more shapes that use one or more of the following features:
  • Gradient patterns or other complex fill patterns
  • Transparency

The Visio 2003 ActiveX Control renders a new metafile every time a change is made to the drawing. This process takes a longer time when there are lots of shapes and when the shapes use gradient fill patterns, other complex fill patterns, or transparency.

This problem was first fixed in a hotfix that is now contained in a service pack. If you installed the latest Visio 2003 service pack, you do not have to install the hotfix.

Service pack information

This problem was first corrected in Visio 2003 Service Pack 2. To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Visio 2003. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Hotfix information

This problem is fixed in the Visio 2003 post-Service Pack 1 hotfix package that is dated October 21, 2004.

For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
After you install this hotfix, add a line in your custom code that sets the Application.OnDataChangeDelay property value. The Application.OnDataChangeDelay property value is required to enable the update and must be set to -2. Note that adding this property value to your code without installing the hotfix will have no effect on the performance of your program.

To work around this problem, use one of the following methods, depending on your situation:

• Remove gradient patterns, complex fill patterns, or transparency from shapes contained in drawings that are hosted by the Visio 2003 ActiveX Control.
• Create new shapes that do not use gradient patterns, complex fill patterns, or transparency.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

For more information about the Visio 2003 ActiveX Control, visit the following Microsoft Web site: For more information about how to automate Visio 2007, visit the following Microsoft Web site:For more information about Visio, visit the following Microsoft Web site: