MS Word experts out there PLEASE help

[Katy44]

This is driving me mad!!
I have 2 problems with Word 2002 and I don't know if they're linked.
The first one is that whenever I apply formatting to a line or paragraph it applies it to the whole document. I then select 'undo' which puts it right. It doesn't do this if I just apply to a section of a line.
This isn't a huge problem normally but I'm writing an assignment and to apply the same formatting to the whole document can take up to 5 minutes (the the same again to remove it when I click undo). I've looked in my Autocorrect options but can't see anything obvious.
The other one which must be linked is every so often I'll be typing and it'll seem to 'stop and think'. I then wait for 5 minutes and all of a sudden what I've typed appears (complete with typos )
This can't be a processor issue I don't think - nothing else open apart from MN and have checked the processes, everything as you would expect. Computer has 1.6GHz of RAM.
Please help as this is driving me mad!!

I can think of two lines of attack. (1) Re-install Word. (2) check for a virus (for the speed problem).

btw 1.6GHz (cycles per second) is the speed of the processor. RAM is memory e.g. 512MB.

Fixed the formatting thing, using this
What a pain!

clerkKent- thanks I should know that

Don't think we should have a virus, DH has just uninstalled and reinstalled everything, inc the operating system this weekend. Might just try restarting again as the speed thing might have been linked to the bl**dy formatting issue.
I hate computers

The "wait for 5 mins" - could be doing an auto-save. Depending on how reliable your machine is and how often you remember to save the doc yourself, you could think about turning that off. (think default is normally every 10 mins).

Ah! That sounds likely as it attempts to restore every time I open it up having closed it down through the task manager.
Well at the moment I'm writing about 2 words a minute so that's definitely worth a try.

There was something very odd about that file - it was a 10 page Word document, text only, and was 100M!
I've copied and pasted it into another one which is 60K. Needless to say it saves etc a lot faster now!