Background:
A few weeks ago my home office was hit by lightning and most of my equipment was zapped, phone, modem, router and computer. After a few tears I replaced the stuff and to my joy the HD from the old box was accessible and I could copy data and scripts easily.

I reinstalled the application software like perl, Office, editor, etc on the new harddrive which has MS XP Pro SP2 preinstalled, same as on the old box which had been upgraded to SP2 a couple of months ago. During this quest I have reinstalled perl and Office just to make sure.

I have a rather large application written in Perl which uses Win32::OLE to control MS Word. The app generates reports with tables in them, it IS pretty slow due to OLE and Word, neither one a speed demon. The application draws a lot a CPU, nearly 100 % for several minutes, when Word does it's chores.

Problem:
However on the new computer, which is a few times more powerful compared to the old one, the parts of the application which deals with Word is running very slowly, in the order 10 times slower. The CPU-load is between 0 and 5 %.

Stuff like saving to disk and printing from Word seems OK. I think that it is the marschalling between perl and Word which has gone awry. Some new security feature or what ?

I have been searching google, microsoft, activestate but no avail. This is kinda my last straw ... any ideas ?