startup slow office applications; speech recognition?

Dear all,

Recently I have started to experience a very slow startup
of all office applicatoins on my IBM T20. I have XP Pro
and a Office 2002 (Word is in SP3).

Sometimes Word complains upon startup of an Office
application such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint that I need
400mhz and 128mb for speech recognition. I have checked
and but speech recognition is turned off. Control Panel |
Languages and Regions | Language | Details | Advanced.
Yet, Word still occasionally complains that my laptop is
not suited for Speech Recognition. I don't use Speech
Recognition so that is not a problem for me.


a) how come if speech recognitio is turned off Office
applications still, occasionally complain?
b) why is startup of the office application so slow (say,
60sec)

I think this behavior started when I applied a service
pack against Office, but I am not sure.

Help appreciated!

JL