If you are an experienced user of OS X and this is happening to you, then I
am afraid I have no idea what's wrong and it sounds most peculiar
However, if this is your first experience of OS X, it may help to know that
this kind of thing happens on all multi-tasking systems: OS 9 did not do it,
and it may take you a little while to get used to it.
I suspect your system may be a bit light on memory. The "thumb" or bubble
elevator will be unresponsive if Word is waiting for the system. If the
pauses are frequent and annoying, add more RAM to your system: it will make
a huge difference. Word 2004 is running very well here in 256 MB of memory,
but Entourage is the only other application running.
In OS X, it pays to Quit, rather than minimise, applications you are not
using. Applications that are open but minimised are still consuming memory.
They don't take much processing power, but they do add to the list of things
the system has to do, and they do occupy memory. If you want to run with
lots of heavyweight applications such as Word running concurrently, 1 GB of
memory is good. Otherwise you will get longer pauses and more of them.
No, you should not be able to highlight items in Word while the Finder or
any other application is active. However, again, in OS X it's a bit
difficult to tell where one "application" ends and another begins. For
example, the "Finder" in OS X is just another application of the operating
system, similar to Word (although it has some special privileges...). On
the other hand, whenever you see a File dialog in Word, you are actually
looking at a piece of the Finder...
If the system is dragging a bit because it is out of memory, it may be a
little while before the display (another application...) notices that you
have changed from the Finder to Word. So you can get these rather odd
effects.
But if it's not that, I am afraid I have no idea what it is...
