Multiple documents in Word XP ...

[Philphollower]

This forum has been very helpful to me -- my thanks both to the folks who post questions and to those who use their time to reply to help.

What I'm about to describe has been an issue since before the other topic I posted to this forum re the error message -- which is resolved in principle, thanks to your help.

My Office XP for Small Business is running on Windoze XP Home, on a Compaq Presario laptop, with 256 MB RAM. I'm on a home ADSL network behind a hardware firewall, no ZoneAlarm software, no constant anti-virus software. (I do occasional scans, because the constant stuff slows the system down too much -- and viruses haven't been a problem anyway.) SpyBot S&D comes up with a clean system, no spyware or adware sending my HD to the net.

When I have more than one document open in Word and I'm plugged into the network, I regularly get a freeze of up to 20 secs., especially when moving between documents. During the freeze I notice that the network icon in the sys-tray is glowing -- usually at least on the send side -- often on both sides. When I'm not plugged in, this doesn't occur. It happens regardless of whether or not I'm running either Outlook or Firefox (my web browser). Very annoying, and it sometimes interferes with various edit applications between documents.

What's happening? Is there a setting in Word that I can change so that I can stay plugged in and avoid the delays? Or is this something in Windoze that I should be examining?

Thanks again, enjoy your summer, wherever ye be.

Cheers -- Phil