I have had the same problem with documents that have relatively simple formatting, very few graphics inserted, a TOC, etc. I notice the CPU box turning green, then look at the Task Manager and see the lovely message Word "Not Responding" and find that word is at 32,xxx Kb, using/hogging my memory and the document should not be that big.
The last document which caused the problem was approximately 155 pages, but as I would make minor editing changes, i.e., bolding a word, I would notice an hourglass that would hang in there for an extended period of time, and then would see the page count at the bottom bar rise from 155 pages to over 400+ and climbing, and would hit the escape button. Whenever I would apply formatting, I would notice that not only would I have the formatting applied to that particular word/text, it would be applied to the whole document, and would have to hit the "undo" to eventually get the desired format change
After fighting with various versions of Word (from 2.0 on), I have found there are a few tricks you can try to reduce the size and try to manage the document.
1. Save your document often, and this may help stabilize it. Use Explorer to occasionally check the size of the file and notice if it starts growing substantially, if it does, you will know that it is going to become unstable.
2.You can open a blank document and use Insert-File-<name of your file>, and sometimes this will reduce the size back to a manageable size and stabilize the file until you have, again, made too many edits for Word's memory management system to handle. This may have to be repeated over the course of your working with the document, depending upon how much work you plan to do with the document.
3. Another trick is to save the document as another document. I always have an "X.doc" in my folder, which I use to save my document, work on it a while, then save it back as the name of my document. If you try this, you will notice that the file will shrink substantially.
The file I recently was working on grew from 1433 Kb to 6700+ Kb during editing, then would shrink back down using a combination of these methods. It is sad to have to waste time with these gyrations, but it must be done. Also, ensure that you have "always make backup file" turned on in your Options, that way you are at least protected in case of a crash and will not totally lose your work if Word does go ballistic and lose your work. If you save often, you will have pretty recent coverage and less heartache
Hope this helps you some. I am continually searching for additional help from Microsoft... still...
