Word 02 and Excel 02 hang for a few seconds every 20 seconds

[Walter Donavan]

Windows XP Pro
Office XP Pro
Dell 1.6 GHz Celeron 256 MB RAM 60 GB HDD 85% free.
BellSouth DSL, always connected

Sorry for the long post, but it's complex.

I'm attempting to help solve this for my church. They were without AV
protection for three months. The problem showed up somewhere around then;
nobody's sure.

Today I installed AVG, SpyBot S&D, and a gaggle of other security tools. AVG
found two copies of SoBig.E, which I removed. Spybot found 65 spyware files
or cookies, which I removed. I then defragmented the hard drive and removed
the temporary files such as cookies and IE6 detritus.

The computer runs better, but it still slows and slows and slows when
running Word or Excel.

Ctrl+Alt+Del > Performance shows a sine wave of busy, ranging from about 4%
to as much as 16% and even more busy. The Office pgms hang during the busy
times.

The computer is on a network, with three other office computers. I know
nothing about networks.

I do know that Dell installs a ungodly amount of useless crap that I'd like
to get rid of.

Since I have exhausted my skills, I have suggested to the church that they
either bring in a network expert, or that they let me rebuild the computer.
If I rebuild it, they want the original Dell crap reinstalled. They won't
hear of my scraping the HDD clean and installing Win2K Pro so there won't be
any crap. I probably couldn't do that anyway because the Dell CDs are
required for the drivers, etc.

My questions:

Does anyone have any idea what is causing this? Remember, it just showed up

Is rebuilding the system the logical next step if we can't fix it?

Should we bring in a network guy instead?

Is it even feasible to rebuild the system with Win 2K Pro and find the
drivers on the Win 2K Pro CD or on the Net?

Any help will be appreciated.

 

[Phil]

When you open task manager you need to look under the processes tab. Find
the process that is using the cpu cycles and post back. BTW - 16% is quite
normal when running office apps. Right now I'm using excel, autocad, windows
media player, outlook express, and fire fox, and I'm using 25-30% of the cpu
cycles without any probs at all. Sounds to me like all the spyware or
viruses were not cleaned out. Did you run CWShredder?
More memory might help as well. 256 will work ok, but depending on what that
dell has loading it may be maxed out. Use msconfig to stop things from
loading, unistall any software you don't need.

 

[Walter Donavan]

Thanks, Phil.

The program using the CPU time is Word (WINDWORD.EXE).

It uses anywhere between 7 and 41%.

The office manager read me the percentages (I'm at home):

41%, 32, 7, 8, 41, 32 ...

 

[Phil]

I assume you mean winword.exe (windword.exe is not a MS file). See if this
helps:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q259413

 

[Walter Donavan]

Thanks again, Phil. I forwarded it to the office manager. If she can't deal
with it, I'll give it a shot on Sunday.

I have the feeling that something in it will work.

Walter

 

[Phil]

You're welcome.