Recently for no obvious reason certain operations have slowed down. Most noticeable and annoying is that to close down. MS Word 97 or Excel files takes typically 11 to 13 seconds per file. It makes no difference whether I have only one program open or whether I have multiple programs such as Word 97, Excel, MS Schedule and Bitware Receive Manager open at the same time. I have opened Resource Meter to try and detect something running unknowingly in the background but that has not identified a problem. Defragmenting my HDD makes no difference and Scan Disk results indicate no poor sectors.

Extra programs using Word and Excel as a shell or interface for their programs could cause this problem. An example of this happening is with a help file creator. This program uses Word as an easy and simple interface for making help files. This considerably slows down the ‘host’ program which has to load all of the add-on modules, etc’¦ The simplest way to get around this is to uninstall and then reinstall Word and Excel. This will wipe all of the old program data (including add-on modules) and reinstall a fresh version.