Hi southernpeach
there are some hidden tasks in office programs launch time that cannot be disabled using Microsoft Office Options and need tweak tools or you know windows registry very well.
if you want faster launch for Office programs you need to:
>Disable Customer Experience Improvement program
>Disable logging Microsoft Office activity
>Disable error reporting
and for Microsoft Office Word:
>Do not check if MS Word is the default HTML Editor
with disabling these tasks in Microsoft Office, those programs would run much more faster, for example in ms office word launch time every time it take seconds to check it it's Default HTML editor or no, but it take less than 1 second to avast! scan it. Exclude Microsoft Office Folder from being scanned by avast! would not be solution for your problem.
(for doing above tasks you can use this program:
http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/boost-speed it's not free, but you can install it in trial version and do what you need
)
