I am a computer tech and I've run into a problem that I'm hoping you guys might be able to help me out with (I'm doing this as a favor for a friend on my own time). I'm working on a 1.4 Ghz laptop running XP with 1 gig of Ram.

The problem is fairly simple. Every time you copy and paste more than a page or so of information (generally from the web but not always), the machine hard locks. As in no ctrl-alt-del. I have to power down the machine.

I cannot recreate the problem in safe mode.

I have done the following steps:
Turned off hardware graphics acceleration.
Deleted normal.dot
Deleted the Data folder out of the registry key
Deleted all temp data
Attempted to use non-formatted data for pasting (smart-paste).
Checked for any extra add-ons (it's barebones and has none that I can find.)

I did find that the latest updates including security updates were not installed. I did this, but the problem still exists.

I'd appreciate any suggestions (yes, I have done a full removal and reinstallation of the program as well!).

It happens only with word not on other applications.