speed up, some apps, "save as" times?

Hello: I haven't noticed this as an issue until some recent w8 auto updates (last 2 months, is generous estimate). "Save as..." take about 20-30 seconds, for 2 3rd-party medium weight word processors, to display the folder window where your want to save. It looks like it takes the computer a while to "round up" all the directory info to display it in the "save as..." window.
-I did read here & elsewhere on changing the general option in the properties of a folder. I don't think that helped. I did also read (here?) about disconnecting the networked folders. I did do that, rebooted. There was no speedup. But then I remapped them all, and now MS-branded apps like wordpad & word/excel, do show the "save as..." window within a second or 2, as before. I don't know what's going on here. Advice? (Note: I do clean up the reg daily). Thank you.

That's quite a few updates to sift through. Have you tried searching ms update list for one pertaining to file save dialogs? I tend to avoid updates unless I think I need a specific one or it's a service pack. So I haven't yet found an efficient way to search through them. Perhaps another poster has some ideas to make tracking down the culprit easier.

The more it has to go thru, more data, disk space and even networked drives, the longer it takes to sift thru to find appropriate place for saving data. In some cases it also has to compare intended name of data file to see if there is a name conflict. MS office programs like Word also save temporary files at certain intervals (adjustable) during the work so you don't use everything in case of trouble, so they have to take that into account before doing anything. There is also the matter of One Drive with which it might try to sync. A bit of each of those happenings and you might end up with quite a long time for it to work. With data being saved to SSD, One Drive disabled and no networked drives, at least for me, it happens instantly with MS Office programs and Corel Draw but when default place is set to slower HDD it takes few seconds to appear.
Just my thoughts and from some experience I had with it.

I've noticed in programs I've written when checking for an existing folder, mapped drives really slows it down. For some reason using the UNC style path name like \\machine\folder works faster. But it only works faster for folders. Not for files. I have no idea why.

Of course what slows it down the most is when the drive is no longer mapped. It hangs waiting for the network time out.