and I thought I knew MS Word pretty well.....
I had been "cleaning" clipboard by copying a blank whatever space and it appeared to be doing the trick (for a few years), but this recent freeze has been happening even with
one word pastes - not pages and pages of stuff!!
Another person put me onto what "appears" to be the solution - why it works, I don't know but it has solved the issue.
I searched for normal.dot on C-drive - deleted the 3 (maybe corrupted) normal.dot files and re-started Word - bingo!!
Maybe you know why - I'll continue on in my ignorance - but happy to have the time waster removed from my day.
THANK you for your replies - really appreciated. Living and always learning.
Bruce