Templates slow to open

I have several templates (which bring up forms) on my PC. Word 2002 opens them very slowly. I have tried several things, deleting normal.dot, reinstalling Office XP and others. When I make a change to a specific autotext, it seems to help with opening the templates regularly, but when I close out of word and get back in the same problems occur. I have also tried reinstalling the templates. Any .dot file opens slowly. Any suggestions. I have all updates, and am running Win XP and Office XP.