I wonder if some techie out there can solve a problem for me? I have a performance problem inserting objects (e.g., Microsoft equations, ISIS/Draw sketches, PowerPoint slides etc.) in Word documents on my one-year-old desktop PC. I have had the problem for at least 6 months but I can't remember how the machine behaved when brand new. I have spent some hours talking to the Microsoft help desk but nothing they can suggest has improved things. I have tried obvious things such as deleting lots of .tmp files, defragmenting the C disk etc. I have no virus problem according to the latest version of Norton. The machine is a Pentium III with lots of free disk space and 128MB RAM. I am using Windows 98 and Word in Office Professional 2000 (and ISIS/Draw 2.3, but I must emphasise that the problem is not specific to ISIS objects). When I have formulated an equation, say, there is a delay of some seconds before Word incorporates it. When I open a document with an object in it, the text appears instantly but there is a delay of seconds before graphics appear on the page. When I edit very long documents, Word sometimes crashes and if I print such documents I can sometimes get totally random errors in ISIS diagrams. The problem is still there when only one application is running, and the machine behaves equally badly in Safe Mode. I do not have this problem with my ancient (3-year-old) ThinkPad laptop, on which I am using Windows 95, Word 97, and ISIS 2.2. On that machine, when I have finished drawing in ISIS and I update Word, the diagram appears instantly in Word on a hatched background, then appears as expected the instant I close ISIS. There is also no delay with equations etc. If I formulate a document on one machine and use it on the other, the performance is poor on the Windows 98 machine and just fine on the Windows 95 machine, whichever machine was used to prepare the document. I used to use McAfee on both machines; I now use Norton on both. In any case, Microsoft have shown that it is not the anti-virus software that is slowing everything. We have also shown that the problem is independent of the print driver (although, as it happens, I use the same one on both machines). Clearly I could upgrade to Windows 2000 on the newer machine but that will bring a whole new set of problems. Has anyone experienced this OLE problem before? Is there a quicker and cheaper fix than changing all my software or buying a new machine? (I am constantly buying new machines anyway, but I want to keep the old ones functional, for business reasons.) Wendy Dr. Wendy A. Warr Wendy Warr & Associates, 6 Berwick Court Holmes Chapel, Cheshire, CW4 7HZ, England Tel/fax +44 (0) 1477 533837 wendy@warr.com http://www.warr.com chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)