Delay opening documents on some workstations

I’ve recently noticed a delay of almost 5 seconds when opening documents from SharePoint on some workstations.  After a bit of investigation I discovered that this was caused by Internet Explorer Automatic Configuration.  On the workstations that were experiencing a delay the “Automatically detect settings” option was enabled.  After disabling this option documents opened straight away.

To locate these settings in Internet Explorer go to Tools –> Internet Options –> Connections tab–> LAN Settings