Thanks Peter for all of your efforts and very helpful
advice.  We are really seeing an improvement in the mail
merge speed.  We've gone from 5 hours to merge to 12
minutes!  And we're planning on bumping up the ram and cpu
speed by three or four times each!  Here's what we found:
-omit bullets; they're bad!
-replace textboxes (they're bad too!) with frames (which I
had never heard of before this project!)
-always merge in Normal view
-we also cleaned up our temp and temp internet files

Thank you again, Peter!
Lindsey