I've tested out the MA3 in windowed mode. Launch Excel & Word with no problem at all (with sleep setting range from -1 to 30).
My setup is a Acer laptop running Celeron 1.5GHz with 2Gig of ram. WinXP Pro SP3 and Office 2K3.
Is that launching Excel or Word by clicking on a *.xls or *.doc file (or a shortcut to a file)? That's where I see the problem.
If MA3 is running, and I just launch Excel or Word (blank - no document associated), then they open quickly. But that's not the problem.