WORD "hangs" or freezes randomly

search for and rename normal.dot
the next time you start Word, it will recreate it.
see if that helps..

close word, then search for and rename the file 'normal.dot'.
normal.dot will be recreated automatically next time you start word.
see if that helps..

i tried it, it seemed to work. before i did that, i closed out of a program the user has always open, an old dos based program. task manager said it was use 98% cpu. hmm... that could be it. i'll keep checking. any final ideas or anything before i close this?

I would try reinstalling it and doing a custom install and making sure that everything is installed and none of it is set to "install on first use". I had trouble with that on my machine when I just did a typical install and it seemed to be constantly hanging like it was doing something in the background and I had nothing else running.

This experience may give you ideas about how to solve your problem. It may be a software problem. This used to happen to one of our computers alot. It was running Win98 and Office/Word 95. The diskspace was running low. If we printed something and then continued, Word would hang. Turned out it was a software memory leak problem which was showing up because free resources were low.
Two attempts at resolving it: applied all the latest patches from microsoft to windows and word. This did help matters. Real solution was Windows XP Pro and Office 2002. I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of WinXP!

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