The weirdest Microsoft glitch ever?

Got a new computer at work. It's sweeeet. Dell Precision 390 with Core 2 Duo and a big-ass hard drive. However, I also saw fit to order it with Vista 64 installed, something that has confused the hell out of my coworkers, including Dave who ordered almost exactly the same computer with XP.

I do have my reasons; sooner or later I'm going to have to get a Vista machine working in the field (either ours or someone else's) and the sooner I learn how to hack about with it the better. Trouble is that any problems and I'm on my own. The university's IT Services quite sensibly don't support it yet.

So far though, it's not been all that bad. I like the new explorer interface and the new security model is long overdue. Aero and the sidebar haven't blown my skirt up yet but they're also largely unobtrusive. The only bit I don't like is Media Player 11, which I still haven't got used to. I liked 10.

As for snagging, getting it to talk to other computers on our antiquated network has been a pain thanks to the lack of IPX/SPX support. I've found the solution is to make sure whatever you want to talk to has IP NetBIOS enabled. Also, there was this weird thing where an mp3 would skip exactly 20 seconds before the end of each song, but an updated soundcard driver from Dell sorted that.

But here's the weirdest of the weird and I defy anyone to explain this to me: There seems to be a voodoo incompatibility with Word 2003. The symptoms are that the taskbar, sidebar and start menu slow to a crawl when I open certain documents. The odd thing is that there is still plenty of CPU and memory resources and the individual applications still run fine (although switching between them is a pain). The even odder thing is that it only happens for some documents and not others (I've not found a pattern yet) and if I have multiple documents open, it only happens if one of the offending documents is the topmost.

Bizarre as hell. Tried restarting the system, running in XP compatibility mode, turning off anti virus, disabling Aero and updating the graphics drivers and all sorts but nothing changes it. A couple of workarounds I've found is to make a new Word document and bring it to the front when I want to use the start menu. If a blank document is topmost, it seems to work fine. Or, if I copy and paste the contents of a nonworking document into a new document and close the original, that seems to work too. I've seen some pretty weird computer bugs in my time, but this has to be one of the weirdest. Hats off to you Microsoft.