"The (fill in the blank) is not responding."

[Littletoot]

Mid last year (2012) I upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010 on an XP machine at work (x32) and a Windows 7 machine at home (x64).
Since then I am constantly seeing “Excel is not responding” on both machines, sometimes during recalculation but most often when I am saving the spreadsheet. At the same time I usually have Task Manager open and see a “Not running” message by the listed program. After a few (sometimes 60!) seconds the program resumes, runs for a little while, stops, then resumes.
At home I moved to Office 2013 but still see the not responding message. Also at home I see “Malwarebytes is not responding” when I do the quick scan, so the issue is not restricted to Excel.
Last week at work I upgraded to Windows 7 (x64) but still get the not responding message.
I never saw the message or experienced Not Responding in XP with Office 2003.
Both machines have 8 Gig of ram. I am perplexed. Could it be my hardware? Or is it the “new” Office?
We never tried Office 2007 but I’ve seen threads on this site which have also experienced the Not Responding.
Any insight would be much appreciated.

[HansV]

Since the problem also occurs with non-Office applications such as MalwareBytes, it would seem to be a more general problem. It's not the amount of memory - 8 GB is plenty for Windows 7, and Windows XP can't use more than about 3 GB.
If you look at the Processes tab of the Task Manager, do you see other processes that consume a lot of CPU capacity?

Microsoft has some troubleshooting suggestions for Excel:
Excel 2010 not responding, hangs, freezes or stops working
Excel: How to Troubleshoot Crashing and Not Responding Issues with Excel
Not all of them will be relevant to your situation, but it's probably worth a look.

[DaveA]

Also remember that Office 2010 is a 32 bit program and will NOT take advantage of the full 8 G on the 64 bit machine.
Yes, there is a 64 bit version of Office 2010, but very few people have it.

What other programs, services and processes do you have running?
They ALL will use some RAM and just may be the source of this "Not Responding" message.

I have seen this on a few of my large database type of programs (Family Research). I run 3 different programs and I see this at different times on both 32 and 64 machines. One program that was just updated, provides a 64 bit on a 64 bit OS and machine. I have not seen this message on a 64 bit machine running the new version.