Thanks again for responding. Whenever I open up and try to sort by "CPU" I only get "00" next to each item (most of the time). Starting Word or PowerPoint gets the "processes" tab of the task manager to go a little crazy, but it's hard to say what exactly it's doing. It's too fast to watch all at once, otherwise I'd be able to report back what it's doing. Thank you again for your help.
You should see WinWord.exe near the top, and the anti-virus will probably kick in too. Nothing else.
It sounds like you have a fairly new machine...FYI on my LAPTOP at work WinWord starts in less than 1 second.