I hope someone from Microsoft support is reading this
because I spent a good deal of time tracking down the
source of this problem using SMS Network Monitor.  The
cause is apparently due to the fix discussed in this KB
article that is now malfunctioning:  

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?
url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-017.asp

Some core Windows component is trying to access
crl.verisign.com (the first thing you'll see is a DNS
lookup to resolve the IP for this domain).  It then tries
to download the file
http://crl.verisign.com/Class3SoftwarePublishers.crl.  
This file is a 'certificate revocation list' that I can
only guess that VeriSign (?) maintains.  It contains info
about security certificates that were fraudulently issued
under Microsoft's name and now MS has fixes in their OS
to download this file off the internet (frequency
unknown) and use for OS validation.  However, the site is
DOWN (or some of the IP's that crl.verisign.com point to
are).  This is causing whatever's requesting this file
via HTTP GET requests to timeout (usually it tries about
4 times, every 4 secs).  To compound the problem,
apparently now even if the file is successfully
downloaded, the control seems to keep downloading the
file every time it initializes (actually, according to
the network trace, it downloads it twice starting MS
Word).  Definitely a huge problem in something.

You would think that if this type of scheme were being
used that the control would only do this every week or
two at most and cache the result, but it appears to now
be malfunctioning (possibly due to some other certificate
expiration?) and doing this all the time now (seems to
have started yesterday for me on all 3 of my machines at
home and my work PC now too).

I've tried ping'ing the site periodically through the day
and the I keep getting redirected to various IP
addresses, some of which are up and some that go up and
down very randomly.  It tells me that someone is working
feverishly to try to stop what now seems like a denial of
service attack to the site(s) because of the malfunction.

Whatever's doing this does have some intelligence built
in, though.  If you disconnect your LAN cable or disable
the LAN card, it gives up immediately and all appears to
work fine.  Not a good workaround.

For me, it's also affecting other programs like Norton
Antivirus when trying to launch the config from the
system tray.  If I take a network trace, I see the same
behavior.  Problem seems to have gotten worse after I
downloaded the latest NAV program updates, too.  It
really depends on the app and how many times it causes
whatever's doing this to go out and try to download the
file.

You would think MS's support would be flooded with calls
by now and VeriSign should be quite upset with a world of
Windows PC's now slamming the site.  I thought it was
only happening to me until I dug into the problem myself
and realized this should be happening all over.  
According to this message board and other searching
around the internet this appears to have started.

This needs to be fixed by Microsoft ASAP.