It was for me. Turned out that that my Normal.dot file, usually 38 kBytes, had grown to 1.4 MBytes. That’s what was taking so long – loading it each time.

Simply deleting the file was a good temporary fix back in May (Word automatically re-creates it if it’s missing). On Win7 for me it was in:

C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates

Lately, it’s been happening again – this time Normal.dot had grown to 1.8 MBytes (since May!).

Investigation revealed that the file grew by about 2 kBytes each time I loaded a file. I had a look at the binary of Normal.dot to see what was taking up so much space, and saw lots of Unicode text reading things like “Sign in to Office Live Workspace beta”.

So I un-installed “Microsoft Office Live Add-in”. Now Normal.dot doesn’t grow anymore.

This post is tagged “Sad”.