Word is sluggish.  It is trying to do something in the background that slows
me donw.
For example: I am working in a five-page document with a few embedded
pictures and Word is just sluggish. Evrytime I type something in, it starts
crunching something in the background; I can not see the place holder until
Word has finished whatever it is doing.

While Word is stalling, one can see a little book icon turning its pages on
the left of the status bar at the bottom. When Word is finished whatever it
was doing, a red cross appears over the book.

I would like to stop this process, but I do not know how. I tried right
click on the book icon, and it opened the spell check options. But unchecking
the spell/grammar checks did not resolve the issue.

I opened the Windows Task Manager and I see WINWORD.EXE taking up ~50% of
the CPU activity (the other ~50% are taken by the System idle process).

Can any body help me to regain control of this runaway Word?

Thanks, Victor G.