I think I have figured it out. I tried removing the autoave feature (I pretty much turned off everything 'auto'). I also turned off the EndNote citation manager updating feature. Both didn't do a thing. Word kept ramping up on the processor (I know it is Word, I checked activity monitor). Tried doing a complete reinstall of Office, went smoothly, but the problem still presisted. Even worse, I have been getting beachballs of death that start locking up Word, making progress difficult. Also an odd sort of small window kept popping upon the left side of the screen before Word actually got stuck. It seems to be happening with only one larger document that I am working on (smaller ones work fine). Anyway, to get to the solution; I scrolled through the entire document (top to bottom) by moving the text cursor with the up and down arrows. After going through the whole document and letting Word image all of the included pictures, I no longer get this odd processor consumption. I think there was an issue with Word trying to re-layout the text and unimaged pictures as I was adding text in the middle of the document. Word may have been stuck trying to re-layout a picture that it didn't 'see' yet (i.e. not yet imaged to the screen). Oh well, problem solved. Thanks for all of the suggestions, though!