| All comments about osa.exe: |
 Alex | Office Startup Assistant |
 micxz | Microsoft Office Startup Assistant that is loaded at start-up and improves performance by handling automation, Office fonts, certain Office commands, and Outlook notification. |
| | it's next to useless |
 Hunter | One wonders why Microsoft developed it |
 no more | One wonders no more. End task and rename/delete executable. :-P |
 robm | it causes cpu to run at 100% |
| Paolo | Yes Why???? It's the more useless program of the history of computer science! |
| **** | I was running the word 2002 Help- Detect and Repair command and a pgm I have that watches over the start-up menu advised me that OSA,exe is being added to the start menu. |
| one wonders... | it is a waste of RAM and CPU. disable it! |
| Nebie | What is being referred here is about the time,when you are closing any application. |
| | It's worse than useless. Sometimes it's a resource hog, taking up all your cpu time at startup. |
| Benchmarker | Buganfällig, hohe CPU Auslastung = 100% |
| Sole_72 | It's the best to search whith properties and paths |
| | it runs with no problems |
| Eric | it delay the open of all office file however the file will be opened faster once I kill the service |
| Bruce Johnson | Causes CPU to peg at 100% with no visible gain. And no loss when you remove it from your startup folder. |
 brian | my ms word and excel sometime hang when opening - killing this process makes them work fine. other times it is okay. This is on windows 2000. |
| Fox Mulder | Even though Microsoft wrote your operating system, and you are at their mercy, this item is removable and not well documented. Who knows what they are messing with, Get rid of it! |
| Aaaalex | Not dangerous, but annoying. Hogs resources & as others said: Disable. |
| | Useless and it wastes your CPU. I disabled it. You should too. |
| Gerardo | Its Useless |
| DGreth | It is not needed and just puts kills machine performance. |
| Parthy | it change window title as chaatan See also: Link |
| Alexxx | I thought it was useless, but if I handles outlook reminders in the background without having to have outlook open, then I'll use it. |
| Frank Neß | Diese Datei wurde von mir gelöscht. Hatte damit zuvor immer 100 % CPU-Auslaszung |
| Get Rid of it | Forces 100% CPU usage, freezes computer. Can take 3~4 MB of RAM |
| DiskJunky | It does have a performance gain but while it's indexing data and 'optimising', it eats resources and seriously degrades system performance while running - and it can run for some time. |
| Smiling Carcass | I agree with repoeted use, but when I removed and disabled the service, my office apps actually started quiker- and I mean much quicker. For example Microsoft Word now starts fully in 4 seconds instead of the usual 11 seconds. Readers must remember that often these differences are machine-specific and may not produce the same resultd on your machine |
| Adler | It's useless. I've removed it from autostart folder immediately after having completed the Office installation. |
| Marcel | osa.exe oder osa9.exe ist die Office-Shortcut-Bar. Entweder man hats oder man brauchts. Ist sehr praktisch das Teil, aber verlangsamt logischweise dann den computer. |
| Reinvented | Without OSA.EXE I could overclock my Opteron to 3.48 GHz!!!! and stable!!! |
| Simon Fanshawe | Office 97 vruy slow for no apparent reason. Problem re-appeared afetr full uninstall and re-install. Stopping OSA.EXE in task manager solves the problem. |
| Tom | This file isn't visible in my drive but it's a listed application in my registry at HKCR & HKLM. Since this is a Windows 2000 (sp4) box without Office installed I wonder if it's used as a malware exploit tool. |
| | a shortcut to OSA.exe with a "-s" option runs the curent screen saver as used to be in Office before 2003 |
| What a dump | Everyone says his bit but nobody states a solution - what a crummy page. |
| sac_of_suc | Makes my comp CPU to peg at 100%. Not sure if its safe to get rid of it tho. |
| jacob | automatically ejects my cd drive continously |
| Would'nt you like to know | Killed the process and now my whole system crashed. Coincidence? I think Not |
| Gerrit | it makes my computer very slow... |
| Emma | It supposedly helps to launch Office faster, but I disabled it and if anything, Word launches faster than before. However, if you use the MS Office shortcut bar outside office applications you should leave it enabled, just FYI! See also: Link |
| Isolytic | It is not dangerous but it consumes cpu and ram, and Office runs the same with or without it. My advice - disable it. |
| Eleave | I've read the information about this file on this site, my opinion is: if this file is included in your startup entry for the first time when you have installed the MS Office - it is not dangerous. If there's more of them - then you should be warned. |
| Gerrit | Started via 'Autostart', everything in Autostart folder is useless |
| Sonic | Part of Microsoft Office XP, if you disable certain services in Windows (Task Scheduler?), this process may get stuck upon windows startup and consume all free CPU resources (Task Manager showing 99% cpu usage for OSA.EXE). |
| Developers developers developers | From the Microsoft Knowledge Base: The Office Startup Assistant (Osa.exe or OSA) is a program that improves the performance of Office XP programs. The Osa.exe file initializes the shared code that is used by the Office XP programs. When you use the Osa.exe file to initialize shared code, the Office XP programs start faster. You can safely remove the Osa.exe file without causing the Office XP programs to fail. However, if you remove Osa.exe, you no longer benefit from the performance advantages that are provided by running Osa.exe. See also: Link |
| myself | it makes the office progs start faster. can safely be removed See also: Link |
| sttav | I renamed it but it still starts. But when I close it I seem to get an error every time I open Word about a problem with links to other programs |
| Skr3d3 | This causes my school computer to be unuseable. If you have it, remove it from the proces list |
| | Datei legte nach löschen meine Windowspartition lahm |
| Austin | Logging in and running office are faster after I removed the shortcut from the programs- startup folder. I guess it's only good at hogging CPU since office runs better without it. The shortcut was called something like "microsoft office." |
| Erika | hangs the computer at shutdown |
| Joe | i was reading this and i clicked the "end task" button and my comps CPU usage went from 99-100% down to 5% then 1%, that might just be my comp but i doubt it, ctrl+alt+delete, processes, highlight it, then click end task |
| Veronica | Useless resource-hog. I deleted it altogether. |
| | Win XP |
| Braeden101 | Win XP, SP2, Office 2003. With osa.exe disabled, C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Source Engine\ose.exe does not initiate, which disallows windows update "Update for Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter (KB925534)" from installing succesfully. Be mindfull of this when choosing whether or not you will disable osa.exe. Link to simple way to enable OSE from command prompt: See also: Link |
| MCDST 3844559 | I have run Ofiice applications with and without OSA.exe and there seems to be no performance difference, (Other than freeing the resources it uses - 4MB Mem, 1.5 MB VM, 0% CPU) I have experienced no crashes, hangs or delays without it. If it is using alot of your CPU, it would be advisable to scan the file for mal-ware. |
| mark | osa = office shortcut bar |
| Trab Nitnelav | my office 2003 don´t opens, it says osa.exe error |
| ip | Not dangerous, but it consumes too much CPU time & slows down OS. It is useless, as well as FINDFAST. Recommendation: disable it. |
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