Word hangs at startup for 40 sec!

[Fabrice Cavarretta]

When I start Word, it hungs for roughly 40 seconds. If I check in the
task manager, I can see it uses 100% CPU during all that time, I have
no idea what it is doing...

It is annoying because of the wait, but worse, I am using MindJet
Mindmanager that is supposed to export to Word, and any export also
generate such a hang (it is creating a new instance), which makes
MindManager loosing patience, dropping the request, etc...

Any idea why Word does that? any idea how to investigate it? (any
startup group to inspect to see if it launches something special? any
pluggin? any way to identify what it is doing during that time)

It seems that it started after I first used either EndNote or
MindManager, so i'm wondering if there's a plugin that such software
may have installed, or maybe the normal.dot file that is corrupted?

I have tried to "repair" MS Office, it did not change anything.

I'm using Win XP Pro SP1, Office 2002, and the machine is generally
very stable and clean (anti spyware, anti virus, firewall, win update
all activated)

Any idea ?

Fabrice

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Generally speaking, I would look for "things that Wrd is expecting to find
but which are not there", particularly if Word needs to look on a network
for them. A specific problem is that If your default printer is a network
printer (and particularly if the printer driver is not installed locally)
and is not available there may be a very long delay in Word startup.

If you start Word using the /a switch (e.g. in Start|Run, use winword.exe
/a), does that change anything? If so, there could be a problem in
normal.dot

Peter Jamieson