Problem with Outlook 2003 composing a new email

I’m having a problem with Microsoft Outlook 2003 and want to know if anyone else has experienced the same problem and if so how did you correct it.
Outlook works fine with one exception. When I go to compose a new email and start typing my message, there seems to be at least a 10 second delay from what I type on the keyboard to what appears on the monitor. This only happens when emailing a new message in HTML mode. If I switch to Plain Text mode all is fine and no delay.

All is fine also when replying to an existing email or forwarding an email. This has just started happening this past week.

So far I have tried to repair Office which did not work.
I have also tried changed my video display to improve performance with no success.
All my other programs are working well with the exception of Outlook.

Hope someone out there has some Ideas I can try. This time delay is driving me crazy.
Sending out emails is not fun anymore when it takes me 20 min to compose a 5 min email message.

I’m running Windows XP Home addition on a 1.2 MHz AMD processor with 1K ram
Video card is ATI All in Wonder with TV

Thanks in advance for any replies.
Spike

It sounds like you have Outlook set to use Word as your e-mail editor. You could uncheck that option, or start Word before composing a new Outlook e-mail message.

Thanks for the suggestion jd but Word is not set as a default editor. Wish it was that easy a fix.

You could try a system restore to a time before the problem started.