Ah, thought you were using the Sage part in this test.
Interesting that the DB server has issues connecting remotely.... We use RDC here in all of our test images remoting to VMWare Servers and I've never seen this kind of delay when exporting to Excel.
Is Office Excel Installed on those PC's also? It could be if not then the Excel may be using the the XPS communication protocols that the printers were using... It loads the drivers in memory but transfers them to the local PC remotely and then back again....
When Crystal exports it refreshes the report and re-runs it.
Try using a report with saved data, it doesn't need to connect to the DB so that may help find the cause.
If you install CR Designer and export from the designer what happens?
We don't use Hyper-V here but I'll see if I can get one going, we may not be licensed to use it.
You can enable CRLogger, CR's database connection logging component and then run SQL Profiler and compare what is being sent with what Profiler is getting
Add these 3 to your System Environment Variables:
LOGGING_DIR = c:\logging
LOGGING_ENABLED_ASSERT = 1
LOGGING_ENABLED_RUNTIME = 30
Create the logging folder and run the report while watching SQL Profiler. Be patient, logging does add a performance delay. But I'm curious what is happening during that 5 minute delay.
Compare the logs to where the DB is local and remote.
You may want to report this issue to Microsoft and get them to look into it as well.
Don