[xppuser]

hi all,

wxp pro sp2, office 2003 sp2, pentium 1.73 Ghz, 512 Mb DDR-Ram,

not quite sure whether this is a machine specific issue, Word or me not
doing things right.

i am preparing a large document. at the moment it is approaching 500 pages
long, lots of texts, tables and figures (no colors, just b&w). lately,
whenever i cut and paste texts/tables from other documents/excels it can be
anywhere between few seconds to nearly 10 minutes before i can do anything to
the pasted e.g. tables. some things that i noticed:

pasted table appeared a few rows at a time, the columns appeared zig-zag,
and the spelling and grammar status were busy scribing (you know the icon at
the bottom of Word 2003, next to language box). the table appeared settled
only when the spelling and grammar status completed it 'scribbling' and this
can take anywhere between a few seconds to, on an occasion, just under 10
minutes.

what i have tried was to cut and paste to a blank document, finalize it
(i.e. fixed the style, formatting, spellings etc). then copy paste into the
document that i am preparing. however this does not appear to solve the
problem (if it is a problem). the spelling and grammar status keep doing its
'scribbling' while i am forced to wait.

not only that, twice now, whenever i alt-tab to something else and then
alt-tab back to word, word shuts down. i have to Start - Word to launch Word
and recover my document. this is a rather worrying situation to me. on both
occasions though i did not loose any work and i do have back-ups of the
documents i am at a lost to explain this behaviour of word.

any help, advice, or work-arounds is appreciated. in particular i am
thinking about splitting the work but i do not know whether that is advisable
and what would happen to all the captioning and cross-referencing of all the
tables and figures that i have undertaken.

regards,
jes