I had a similar problem in Access and it turned out one of my anti-spyware
programs was the culprit.

"STS" wrote:

I use Excel a lot. Some of my spread sheets take a long time to open,
sometimes a minute or even longer. Even files that are small, only a few
hundred KB. Don't think it's my laptop, I have 512 MB ram and about 15 GB
free disk space.
Sometime I experience similar delays in Word. Any ideas how to fix this?