In case this should be of help to anyone:

At work (a large company), I recently started experiencing a problem that seemed hard to trace, right after unspecified "network maintenance". Trying to print even the smallest Word document to my default printer (a large, production machine) resulted in a very slow connection, with Word dipping briefly into "not responding" mode. I discovered that pdf documents showed a similar slowdown, and then discovered that even prompting for Word's page set-up dialogue took up to 10 seconds, also with "not responding" behavior. Repairing Office did no good, nor did uninstalling and reinstalling.

It turned out that what appeared to be a duplicate printer driver, along with an extraneous one, was confusing my machine. When they were deleted, and the printer uninstalled and reinstalled, the problem disappeared.