Word VBA script for reading only causes writes to SSD

[Mark_ITH]

So I have a script that is used to open word documents as read only and when the script runs, Word is creating/editing files in two specific folders as identified by resmon.



These folders are:

....\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.Word

....\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\UsageMetricsStore\FileActivityStore\Word

This isn't a huge problem but it is shortening the life of my SSD as I am read 100,000+ files. In just 3 days, the SSD life has shortened by 5%. I have over 1M documents to scan so this could total trash my SSD very quickly. In the last day, I ran a monitor and it shows over 700 GB of writing by WINWORD.EXE even though I am not saving any of the documents. This is only the data written in the above two folders and mostly the second folder.

Just wondering if there is a setting that I can use to prevent this. Thanks