Other than the obvious file size or number of photos or graphics in the Word file, there are several things that can varry the time documents take to load. Many of these have nothing to do with the Word file or Word itself.

If you open a Word file that is an attachment in an email directly from email, without saving it first and opening from Explore or Word, most email software and security or virus checking software, checks the file before it loads/opens it every time you open the attachment. Some security settings check ALL files for viruses before they open, every time they are open. The bigger the file the longer this can take.

Also if there has been a long history of editing the word doc, there is a lot of extraneous formatting and editing data stored in the file which can cause the file to be slow loading. To clean up some of the extraneous data, do a File, Save As and give it a differnt file name or save it to another folder. Check the file sizes before and after you do this. You may see a substantial decrease in the file size.

Loading any file will take longer if:

- the correponding application is not already running
- the file is on a server rather than your local drive
- there happens to be a lot of network communication traffic occuring when you open the file (even if the file is not on a server)
- other applications running periodically in the background
- how many other applications are open at the time, therefore memory available
- if it has been a while since you last booted the PC (Available memory decreases over time (since the last boot of the system). Some applications and the MS operating system don't always free up all the memory it allocated to run something when they are done using it.)

- cache and memory paging settings, amount of free space on hard drives
- how fragmented the file is physically on the drive (Disk Defragment, usually under Accessories, System Tools can help with this. It will take a while to complete because it works on all the files on the drive.)
- how much free space there is on the drive (For your local drives you can free up space using Disk Cleanup, usually under Accessories, System Tools.
- security settings.