First tof all I want to thank everybody for the attention and assistance.

Let me comment about what was written and maybe I am mistaken about some things:

1.
>>This is not "little." Ten-twenty pages is "little.

My sentence was meant to be read "My doc is a little < 500 pages" as "is a little **less than** 500 pages" using the < operator in place of the words "less than". By now it is over 500 pages.

2.

>>What are you using the section breaks to do?

The book is divided up into many chapters (about 100) which at its beginning has a section break. chapters to start on odd pages and differ in their heading. So I thought this is the natural way to do that.

3.

>>This does a good job of expressing your frustration. It gives someone responding to your question virtually no information about what you have tried, leaving us to guess.

I meant turning off spelling correction in real-time and other settings in options that are supposed to speed things up. But did not work for me.

4.

>>What happens when you disable all add-ins?
When you try editing the document in safe mode?
Open Office apps in safe mode on a Windows PC - Microsoft Office
Safe mode is a diagnostic, not a way to routinely use Word.

This gets the award. I ran Word in safe mode and also switched to draft view and while everything looks ugly it is working at fast speed. Is there anything I should be "careful about" when using OWrd in the mode?

So in the lack of a more elegant solution, I will stick with this for the meanwhile..

Thank again

SF