Word X occasionally hangs for 20-40 seconds

I'm writing fairly long documents using Word X. About every 10 to 20
minutes, Word will temporarily hang, with the spinning beachball. The
hang lasts for maybe 20 to 40 seconds (it varies). Then it's back.
Here's some relevant info:

* Any action, as far as I can see, can trigger this. It can be typing,
scrolling, saving, etc.
* Oddly, when this happens, all other apps freeze up. When Word first
freezes, the other apps work fine. Then, with maybe 10 seconds to go,
they all freeze up. Suddenly, everything unfreezes and Word is fine.
* Activity Monitor doesn't report any particularly strange behavior on
the part of Word during the time that Word is frozen but AM is not.
Just as Word and the rest unfreeze, AM reports for one tick that Word
is hung, but then, of course, it's not.
* This is a Word problem. I never get such a freeze when not using
Word.
* It seems to happen only when I'm actively doing something in Word,
not when it's sitting idle in the background.

Further, this issue has persisted over multiple installs of Word and,
perhaps more surprisingly, over multiple installs of OS X. This
includes a clean install of Tiger onto a fresh hard disk.

I don't have OS 9 anywhere on my disk.

I have tried to resolve duplicate fonts using FontBook.

I have OS 10.2, and Word 11.1 (I think it may actually be 11.1.1 but
that's what the About Word box shows. I have always had the latest
version, using MS's updater).

The strangest thing is how it freezes the other apps. I would have
thought this completely impossible under a pre-emptive multitasking OS.

Stuart

.

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