I use XP Pro and Office 2003. After I completed a Windows Update and all patches completed Word 2003 runs like a dog for a couple of minutes. I can hear my hard drive working when I bring up a Word doc and delays affect my mouse movement until something times out and releases it. This goes on consistently every time I open a Word doc. It does will stop after a while but I can count on it to do it again at any time. What is up?

I see that this prob was around over a year ago..
Did you ever sort it out?

Check your Office startup folder. I had two template files in there which I didn't recognise - possibly to do with dictation software. I removed them so Word just loads using Normal.dot very quickly whereas before it took about 1 minute

Form me the solution deleting the possibly corrupt normal.dot in your profile solved the problem, but I quote the source for further solutions: http://word.tips.net/Pages/T001328_Word_Slow_to_Open_Documents.html

Kalmarandras