I disconnected from the Internet and closed the three biggest eaters of memory: Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, and Dropbox. That lowered my physical memory consumption to 32%, and then I could insert any pictures I wanted, no matter how big. With those three running, it was around 64% used.

The problem, then, is competition for resources, not something going on with Word. Word is apparently just as big a memory glutton as the other three programs, all of which I really need running. I have 2 GB of RAM and no way to add more (short of buying a bigger PC).

This is probably now an issue for another forum, but I'll describe it here. I connected an external hard disk drive with 1 TB of space and added it to the list of locations for page file/virtual memory. Win 10 is not using any of that space. When memory gets overused, things just stop working (e.g., Word), despite there being a ton of space for paging on the new device. I see it in the virtual memory devices list, and I tried letting Windows manage it, and also allocating 100 GB for paging, but Windows just ignores it and instead pulls this nonsense.

Just in case, does anyone in this forum know how to address this problem?