Hi catseye,

Running Office in 32-bit mode is what MS recommends, even on 64-bit systems. That's because some 3rd-party addins etc don't work properly in 64-bit mode.

FWIW, Word can handle documents up to 512MB in size, including 32MB of text. The only way anyone ever gets a document that large is by embedding many graphical objects, Excel workbooks, etc. Indeed, Word can even save documents larger than that - it just won't open them afterwards. So, unless you're pushing the 512MB limit, I don't think any questions of Word's "memory handling of these might also be a little fragile" is likely to be the answer.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]