That's a good suggestion too.

So back to my issue, I installed the 3rd party MDIviewer, and it seems to do the same thing as the MS MDI viewer.

My old MDI documents seem to open fine, but the ones I've been creating over the last 2-3 months stall the system.

I had the Task Manager open while opening a newer MDI doc in the 3rd party viewer, and in addition to the spinning HD the RAM utilization by the app would intermittently jump from 10 MB to 400-500MB!!! It seemed that if the doc had graphics in it that may heve been triggering this crazy behavior...

I am loathe to give up on MDI but it seems that pdf is calling my name