system is painfully slow. eg. opening a Word document takes 3 mins What I've done. -delete temp. files and contents of the recycle bin -Updated and ran antivirus -updated and ran Ad-aware and Spybot -updatd and ran CWstredder -problem still there though Any suggestions?

What is loading in the background as you boot up? Anything you don't use or need turn it off. Is your memory in good working order? A bad memory chip may not stop the machine, but it will slow it down. Check the full RAM loads at start up. When did you last do Windows Updates... and Office updates (there is one recently released for Word). Turn off any features you don't use in Office and other prime softrware, maybe a rethink of your Office options would be useful, so consider re-running install so you can disable things you don't need.

Did this just start or has Word always opened documents slowly? I've seen this when my antivirus was having trouble scanning the document before opening. I also had this happen when I had Spybot running in the background.