Microsoft Word and Outlook 2003 have been jumping to 100% CPU usage when opening and closing Word and especially when sending emails from Outlook for about a month now. It just started from one day to the next and just seemed to get worse over the last week. I searched on and off during the last week for a solution and finally found it today.
The Problem
I had a corrupted Normal.dot file.
The Normal.dot file is the template file that Word uses when initially opening and presenting a blank document to you (or an email if you use Word as you email editor). I can across this thread where a guy mentioned that his Normal.dot file was 3.6mb so I decided to check out how big my file was.
The Fix
I searched and found my Normal.Dot file under:
C:\Documents and Settings\dmasters\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
The size of the file was an amazing 3.6mb as well. I delete it and left the folder open to see how big a new Normal.dot would be. I opened Word and then closed it and the new Normal.dot was created. It was a whopping 31.0 KB. That was a significant difference!
The next test was to see how Outlook performed with the old bloated file gone. Outlook opened quickly and sending out a new message was like a dream. Problem solved.
Possible Reasons for the Problem
I think there are several things that could have caused this issue but I think powering off my computer without shutting it down with Word open could caused this. I was having some issues a while back with my laptop getting stuck because of another program and I held the power button down to kill it.
Another possible solution is a virus. We have pretty good virus scan software here at work and I haven’t seen my computer do anything that would cause me to think that I had one.
Resources
Here are a couple of articles that outline possible causes along with a couple of other items that may help if the above solution doesn’t work.
- Outlook 2003 and MS word suddenly use high amount of Memory
- Loading Word Slow – 100% CPU Usage
- Tech Republic Search Results About Outlook Issues
Technorati tags: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Windows XP, High CPU, Normal.dot, Troubleshooting