While working in MS Word 2003 my cursor turns into a sand-dial every
few seconds and the program does some sort of work, like saving, but I
don't what exactly it is doing. On the lower menu area it says, Word
is....but I don't have time to read what the whole things says. I have
turned off auto-save, fast saves and auto-recovery is set at 15
minutes. The problem occured after the program ran normally for many
months.

I have used MS Word's detect and repair tool, and have removed and
re-installed the whole Office package. The problem occurs on any
document, small and large files. It is really annoying because it
basically freezes every 5 seconds. I have also run a virus scan using
Norton and nothing came up.

Any ideas what may be going on?