The delay has nothing to do with the word counting but, more likely, with background repagination. Switching to draft view and switching off background repagination should restore performance, as may checking the 'show picture placeholders' option. The latter spares Word the computational effort to redraw graphics in the document - but also means you'll only be able to see where they are, not what they contain. Another source of performance degradation is having large tables in the document.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]