Everything, Everything

I was a little bit worried that I kept seeing WINWORD.EXE running as a process on my computer when Word wasn't open. I started looking into it the other day with Process Explorer, and noticed I couldn't bring the window to the front, which wasn't surprising as I noticed it had been started as a service. But I don't have any services that run Word. Without thinking, I tried killing the parent, but that was the process for the DCOM Server Process Launcher as well as Terminal Services, so I got the lovely message telling me my computer was going to restart in 60 seconds. After a restart, which was actually quite useful as I'd been doing stuff with AviSynth and using up nearly half my RAM, I noticed WINWORD.EXE had gone. Success! But I knew it had come back before, when I killed it through Task Manager, so I started Process Explorer again. Then, when the system had settled, I started up Outlook. And up came WINWORD.EXE. It seems that Outlook launches Word in the background, presumably using an RPC call through the DCOM Server Process Launcher. I closed Outlook and away went Word. I started Outlook, and I went into Tools -> Options -> Mail Format and looked for the check boxes that I knew mentioned Word. There it was, "Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages" was still checked. I'd been meaning to go back to creating plain text emails by default for a while, so I changed it to that and made sure both checkboxes to do with Word were gone, and now that weird WINWORD.EXE process doesn't appear. I'm less concerned about it using up my CPU, but now knowing why it had started or kept reappearing was bugging me, as it could have been something other than Word (that's why I started Process Explorer in the first place, to check it was the real WINWORD.EXE that was running). So it looks like my system is still clean, which is good, as my system's been clean for years, so my record still stands.