Glad it went away with your new laptop, and sorry I’m just now seeing this. For anyone who can’t get a new laptop, you could try saving as .RTF (rich text format) which is even more stripped down than .DOC (and less malware prone) and if that doesn’t work I would try Word 2003 in a virtual machine not connected to the internet, if your IT folks can do that for you. Lightning fast! Add Microsoft’s docx compatibility pack if you need to be able to use the new ..x formats at times. My experience has been like Edward’s, the ..x slows me down, as does new Word, new Windows, etc. You can get the newest hottest computer there is and the developers (malware and benevolent ware alike) junk it up because they can.
.docx is actually a zip file. Try renaming to .zip and then opening it, you’ll see what I mean! The computer has to unzip and rezip the file every time you use it. How is that faster? Except if you are constantly waiting for files to upload and download, then maybe that would be faster due to the compression.
It reportedly makes the file more robust in case something goes wrong. You may be able to recover the plain text, for example, if a file gets corrupted. It’s also part of a move to open file structures to others so that automation and other add-ons can be done more easily. I seriously doubt that opening multiple components in a zip file would be slower than opening one giant spaghetti file. The amount of data is the same, and Word files are tiny, tiny compared to graphics files. My edited photo files ( johnbunzick.com if you’re interested) are routinely 300 to 500 Mb.
Love the photos, John.
Save rogue files as an *.rtf. Then save back to *doc or *.docx.