Office 2003 - Mailmerge from Excel hangs/crashes

-Office 2003 Student & Teacher Edition
-Windows XP SP2
-Dell Inspiron 4150

I am in the process of merging an excel spread*** into a telephone
directory document in Word. The spread*** is only 21 columns by 267 rows.
Word hangs every time at various points of the mailmerge. The most common
way it hangs is as I am going through the various records in the spread***
from either the toolbar or the wizard. But it also hangs at other times such
as by changing the data source.

I do not get any error message. Just the hourglass forever. Only way to
get out of it is by ending the WINWORD process from the task manager or from
the non-responding app dialog. When the crash/hang occurs CPU utilization
jumps to 90-97%.

I'v tried repairing the Office install to no avail.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
.

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