Recently installed Office 97 on a new laptop running XP Pro and am having problems with winword.exe hogging CPU while surfing web pages. After finding a few posts about the spell and grammar checkers causing this, I turned them off. The problem still occurs whether the files being opened from the web are html, pdf, or ppt or others. Every time winword.exe starts the CPU usage goes to 100% and everything stops responding until I open Task Manager, highlight winword.exe and click End Process. The CPU usage returns to baseline and the browser is working again until I open another document or two. This is making it hard to do my work. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Just an idea. Did you install Office as customised? Check the Run values under the registry, see if an item for mdm.exe is activated. This is the Script Debug Manager and is installed with Office (certainly with 2000, possbily with 97?). If so then kill it, as it is scanning all Office documents and web pages as they open. Also, it could just be your anti-virus as it scans opening Word documents, which can cause slowdown. Norton is one which slows it down significantly.

I did a search and did not find any mdm.exe file on my computer. If it was an antivirus program why would the Task Manager show winword.exe running at 75-85% of the CPU speed instead of a Norton program? It has not happened for a few days now so maybe the spell and grammar checkers were the culprits after all. Does anyone know if a more recent Office version does the same thing or would upgrading maybe fix the problem? Thanks

Was just an idea, clearly not included with Office 97. MDM.exe is the Microsoft Debug Manager, not an anti-virus, what it scans for is scripting errors, and it's a royal pain.