Hi JAS

Possible trouble-shooting steps:

1. Close Word and re-open it.
Does that solve the problem? If so, the cause might be a poorly-written
add-in that is leaking memory. Unless the add-in was written in-house or
you can convince the developers to fix it, there's probably not much you
can do about it.

2. Re-boot the machine.
Does that solve the problem? If that fixes it, the cause might be
something caused by a login script. Talk to your IT guys.

3. Do you use a document management system? Is the poor performance
associated with opening and saving files, or making big changes that
would cause disk read/writes? If so, try disentangling Word from the
document management system and see if that makes a difference. If
necessary, talk to the administrator of the doc management system,
suggesting that users are likely to find ways to avoid storing files in
the doc management system (I find that this tends to get their notice).

4. Try uninstalling any addins (info on how to identify them is at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/word/HA011514521033.aspx?pid=CL100636481033)

5. In any case, talk to the IT people. I once idly asked the IT manager
what process ran at 6.05pm because I noticed that from 6.05pm for about
10 minutes my machine nearly came to a standstill. The IT manager, of
course, didn't know what it was, but later found out that a backup
process ran at that time. The IT guys re-scheduled it to run later in
the day, which solved the problem from my point of view.

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly.  Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word