Very odd xp/office problem

[The_Otter]

So I just reformatted my laptop running XP and reinstalled office. When I opened up excel to create a simple document it worked fine for a bit then when I went to change the font it hung for about 20 seconds. Next I went to print preview - hung for another 20 seconds. Tried to merge cells -- hung, basically everything I tried to do caused it to hang. I uninstalled office and decided to install office 2007 on it to see if that was the problem. No different, runs fine for a few minutes then hangs whenever I do anything.

Here is a SS of what its doing. When it hangs, it opens a second "window" in the taskbar bottom middle of the screen. Its not a window I see on my desktop, and when I click newly opened window on my taskbar nothing happens. In more clear terms - In this SS I only have one excel document open, I am trying to change the font size when excel hung and opened the second window in the taskbar. You can also see the not responding icon top left, and notice the font window is partially blank. Also I've monitored this hang with taskmanager open, my processor and hdd aren't doing a thing during the lag.

The computer has performed fine thus far after the reformat. Because it did this with both copies of office (both of which have been installed on this computer and performed flawlessly in the past) I think the problem is with the machine, not software. Any ideas?

Here is the SS
http://hvpb.com/test/excel.JPG

[Force Flow]

Have you installed the latest Service packs for Windows and Office, and installed the latest updates?

[Statica]

A few questions for you:
a) Is the file read only? Make sure that it is on your hard drive and not read only
b) Does this happen when you read a certain file or does it happen with a new file .. does it work even if you dont use compatibility mode (as in xlsx files)
c) Does it happen with other Office programs?


Try giving it your Office DVD in the drive and see if it is trying to access any installation files or features that have not been installed on the drive.

Try disable your AVG's real time scanning and check to see if the bottleneck is that r/t scan that may be reading through fonts etc as they are being accessed.