Crystal Reports 2013 freezes when exporting report to Excel

Hi,

I have two Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V VMs set up. Both VMs run Windows Server 2012R2.

VM1 is set up as a terminal server, VM2 runs SQL Server 2012 Standard SP3.

I have Crystal Reports 2013 SP7 installed on VM1 and VM2.

I'm running a Crystal report from report designer, returning ~150k rows and then export it to Excel Workbook Data only (*.xlsx).

The report completes on both VMs in a reasonable time. Only minor differences in processing time.

As you would expect, the report that is running on the same machine as the SQL server is quicker in being generated.

The big difference comes in when exporting the report to Excel.

When I hit the export button on VM1, the report gets exported. It reaches a 100% and then just freezes (not responding for about 5min or more).

Crystal is actually frozen for a longer time then it took to generate the report.

On VM2, the export freezes as well after the report reched 100% of the export, but it is only a few seconds.

I'm wondering what Crystal is doing when it's frozen. It is still doing something, because it's using CPU time, but there is no load on the SQL server.

I don't think it's a problem of having not enough resources. VM1 is set up for dynamic memory, but even with static memory of 24GB RAM there is no change. VM2 is set up with a static 46GB RAM.

The pysical server it runs on is a DELL PowerEdge R720 with 96GB RAM and only those 2 VMs running.

I'm connecting to my database from VM1 through ODBC SQL Server Native Cliet 11.0, 32bit.

Changing this to SQL Server driver makes no difference.

Ping time between both VMs is <1ms.

How can I investigate this further?
How can I find out what Crystal is doing?

I'm running an ERP system (Sage 300 ERP) on VM1 which is using Crystal for all it's reporting. Users are waiting ages when exporting their reports.

The smaller the report however the shorter is the time Crystal is frozen.

It only seems to happen when exporting to Excel.

Exporting to PDF is fine.

Would really appreciate some advise.

Thanks