Ok, it's my turn to beg for a drink at the fountain of knowledge

I use Microsoft Document Imaging pretty much for all of my electronic printing - web pages, letters, etc. MDI is an nifty little (optional) component of MS Office, which creates a virtual printer and allows you to create pdf-like documents in .mdi format. I've always found it a lighter, cleaner and simpler alternative to Adobe, to say nothing of the fact that it's free (well, it's included with MS Office at no extra charge)

Imperceptibly I started to experience problems opening .mdi files that I've created, with the following symptoms:

If I try to open a file, the little viewer app opens up and slows down the computer, almost to a halt. If nothing else is running I may succeed, after a minute or so after hitting Ctr-Alt-Del, in bringing up the Task Manager.

The task manager typically shows normal-to-low CPU and RAM utilization, however the hard drive continues to spin like crazy, even with a small (less than 1 MB) file, and it seems that that's what bogging down the system.

The same behavior is observed when trying to open a file I created on a different, ostensibly "clean", computer.

What I've done is uninstall and reinstall the MDI component in MS Office installer.

My initial thought was that perhaps my almost 90% full HD was to blame, as the files I create somehow become very fragmented, however like I said, when I try to open a file saved to a USB key on a clean computer, the same outcome is observed.

PLEASE HELP!

PS Running vista home, ms office 03