# WINWORD.EXE why hogging memory



## blackcell (Nov 9, 2004)

Alienware XP Professional SP2
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.40GHz (2G RAM)
AA8XE (Intel 925XE-ICH6R)
RADEON X850PE XT Series
WDC WD740GD-00FLA1
NEC DVD_RW ND-3520A
bitdefender 8 pro
Maxtor 1 touch 111 500GB external drive combo

Dear all

Upon using a Microsoft word (edition 2003) document I note with concern that is uses almost 50 percent of my memory with that in mind and since I'm have a 2G machine i feel sure something can be acted upon to reduce the effect of this memory hog ultimately meaning i can listen to music and work on projects. It is not a worm of sort named as WINWORD and my system is clean but am puzzled why its hogging as i say to much memory.

Please somebody deliver me the answer


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## blackcell (Nov 9, 2004)

Alienware XP Professional SP2
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.40GHz (2G RAM)
AA8XE (Intel 925XE-ICH6R)
RADEON X850PE XT Series
WDC WD740GD-00FLA1
NEC DVD_RW ND-3520A
bitdefender 8 pro
Maxtor 1 touch 111 500GB external drive combo

Dear all

Upon using a Microsoft word (edition 2003) document I note with concern that is uses almost 50 percent of my memory with that in mind and since I'm have a 2G machine i feel sure something can be acted upon to reduce the effect of this memory hog ultimately meaning i can listen to music and work on projects.

Please somebody deliver me the answer


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## idowindows (Oct 11, 2006)

I seriously doubt MS Word *alone* is the source to this problem.

What is your memory use without Word or anything else running? It's likely high aswell.

Your computer is likely to have spyware, adware or some type of malware.

Download one of the various freebies and do your scan...

That's likely to surface the culprit(s)...

Keep us posted...



ps - this posting was probably better for the Hardware forum..


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## cuttlefish (Jan 18, 2007)

Open Task Manager and then MINIMIZE winword.exe from an open document ......... check to see if the memory usage drops significently.
This won't solve your problem but MS Outlook and IE all have reputations for eating up memory.
Igree with idowindows that you must have some adaware or other bugs working behind the scenes. Go to www.lavasoft.com and get a free version of their Adaware program - better still lash out and buy the Professional version that has real-time monitoring to stop the stuff getting onto your PC in the first place!


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## gpanagak (Jul 20, 2007)

Hello, this might very well be a case of a corrupt custom.dic file, the custom.dic is a text file, where Word saves words to check spelling.
You can find it (in Windows XP) in C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\[USER NAME]\APPLICATION DATA\MICROSOFT\PROOF, check it's size if it is more that a few KB's (mine is 9KB) delete or replace it.


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## maxjive (Jul 25, 2007)

I have the same problem, and Winword.exe is the culprit.

Whenever Word is maximized, or the window is active, I immediately get a "low system resource" message in the tray.

Winword.exe uses 99% CPU, of which I have a 1.3 GHz centrino processor and 2 Gb of RAM.

I've checked with Spybot, Adaware, and others for bots, bug, viruses, worms, etc. and they come up clean. I 've searched online and haven't been successful yet.

I read one thread which suggested that spellcheck or grammarcheck was the culprit, but turning those off within Word made no difference whatsoever.

I'll let you know if I solve the problem!

P.S. - My Custom.dic file was 800 bytes, so that wasn't the problem for me, anyways


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## slurpee55 (Oct 20, 2004)

1.	On the Help menu in any Office program, click Detect and Repair.
2.	Click Start.

To restore program shortcuts to the Windows Start menu, make sure the Restore my shortcuts while repairing check box is selected.

You might also try closing Word, deleting your Normal.dot file and opening it up again.
Clean up all temp files, just for general principles...let us know if that doesn't work.
It may be that word is trying to continuously do some form of indexing, too.


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## janthonyats (Aug 31, 2007)

i have the same problem with winword.exe taking up a lot of RAM. I found something that seems to have cut it's memory usage in half. Basically a corrupted .dot file that it automatically loads on startup...

To see which .dot files are loading at startup:
- launch word (version 2003)
- under help menu, select "About Microsoft Office Word"
- in help popup, hit the "System Info..." button
- in System Info window, expand "Office 2003 Applications"
- then expand "Microsoft Office Word 2003"
- then click "Summary"
- look for section "Templates"

this is where I found 2 templates being loaded... Normal.dot and sforce.dot... my company uses salesforce.com and so this template was loaded by my IT department when they deployed the laptop to me. I browsed to the directory from which is it loaded (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\STARTUP) and noticed an old temp file (one of those with the ~ in front of the name)! So, i deleted it. I also noticed the sforce.dot file was over 1.6 MB. I moved the sforce.dot file to a different directory (so it wouldn't be loaded at startup)...

then relaunched word and viola! memory used drops from over 45 MB to 24 MB.

Hope that helps.


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## janthonyats (Aug 31, 2007)

I found something else.... word Com AddIns.

This utility will show you exactly what Word Com Addins are being loaded (show more than the Com Addin manager inside word, under the tools menu). http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/officeins.html

I discovered 2 addins (one for SalesForce.com and one for Adobe Acrobat) that are loaded automatically on startup. I changed their setting to "Load on Demand"... my memory utilization for winword.exe dropped to a total of 13 MB . This is a significant change from the 45MB I started with just a little while ago.

By the way, the tool mentioned above also shows addins for all the other office tools... now I can start cleaning up memory utilization associated with Outlook, Excel and all the other pigs.

Good luck... let me know if this works for you.


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