People come into Software Support frequently with complaints about MS Word being slow or unresponsive. I have noticed that MS Word add-ins are often to blame for these performance issues, especially by introducing a delay before starting Word or switching from one document to another. Most of these users have multiple Word add-ins (whether they are aware of the fact or not) and so here is a very quick guide to check to see if add-ins are your issue.
The general idea is to disable add-ins and check to see if disabling a certain add-in made word significantly more responsive. If it did, then either look into updating it or keeping it disabled if you don’t use it. The steps for disabling an Add-in are follow:
1) Go to the Office menu, then select Word Options
2) Go to Add-Ins and take a look at the Active Application Add-ins. Often an Adobe product will be in this list and it is often this entry that is the issue. Select the Add-in you want to disable and press Go…
3) Deselect an Add-in (uncheck the box next to it) and hit OK. Sometimes you’ll get the following error:
If you get this error and are running Windows Vista, close Word, navigate to C:/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office12/ and right click on WINWORD.EXE. Select Run as Administrator and follow the above steps again.