windows 7 - Word freezes when I open a second document

I have Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 installed (v15.0.4797.1000) on Windows 7 Ultimate edition and all of the relevant patches installed that I'm aware of. Whenever I open two documents side by side, my CPU jumps to 16%-18% for the WINWORD.EXE process and both documents suffer from extended freezes of 5-30 seconds each.

I've tried the following:

1. Applying all Windows 7 & Office Updates


2. Disabling all Microsoft Office Add-Ins


3. Running winword.exe /a from the command line per this question: Microsoft Word 2010 crashing when opening a second Word document while first is still open


4. Disabling Antivirus (latest version of Norton Security)


5. Disabling Dropbox (since it seems to have a weird sidebar thing)


6. Rebooting


7. Disabling Hardware Acceleration for Word


8. Disabling Ultramon and AquaSnap (apps that provide additional window management capabilities).


9. Updating Norton Security, UltraMon and AquaSnap


10. Reviewing ProcessMonitor and ProcessExplorer to determine if anything is touching those files which shouldn't be.


11. Extensively searching Google, StackOverflow, SuperUser, etc for answers

I can't for the life of me figure out what's going on or where else I should be looking. I noticed this happening in the last 2-3 weeks but I haven't had any hardware changes since December.

Computer: Core i7 Extreme CPU, 64GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 4TB spinning metal drive, plenty of free disk space, 4GB GeForce GTX 970 MSI video card, etc. There's no good reason I can see that's hardware related.

Anyone have any ideas where else I should be looking? This is driving me nuts and I have a lot of reports I need to be writing but with Word locking up, I'm not making much progress.

Answer

This had "something" to do with saving. I had auto-save set to save every 1 minute and if I manually saved a document, the CPU usage in Word would spike a bit and it would lock up.

I have various theories about specifically what was going on. The issue was limited to a specific set of documents which were created by a template. However after ripping out all of the metadata from those documents and deleting the template setting within Word (pointing it back to the "Normal.dot" template), it didn't really seem to make a difference.

I also looked into the possibility of it flaking out due to OneDrive and did pretty much everything I could to remove/disable it. Nothing seemed to matter.

Eventually, I uninstalled & upgraded to Word 2016 and the problem seems to have gone away. Thanks to anyone who looked at this. I'll keep Procdump in mind for next time something like this happens.