One thing that constantly annoys me is pasting or using HTML content inside Word/Outlook. For instance, replying to an email that has complex HTML formatting and linked CSS files and images takes forever. I've got a 3GHz P4c and 1.5GB of RAM, so the issue isn't local. Ditto for pasting text from a web page into Word (I'm constructing a Word document from some data I have on a page somewhere). It takes up to 20 seconds for the text to appear! When I have a bunch of small snippets, that's obviously unacceptable.

My theory was that it must be hitting the webserver to get the styles. A few minutes with Ethereal and I found out that yes, that's exactly what it's doing. Sigh. I understand the reasoning, but I'd like it to be easy to disable. My connection sucks right now (plus I'm downloading Fedora Core 2), so even loading a simple style page takes a while. I'd like the HTML copying to be able to embed the style info there for other apps to use... or something. I know that by default, the alternatives might be worse (users would lose their styles after pasting and be very confused). But this scenario just isn't working for me either (I have to paste to notepad first :().

A funny thing is, Word always does this, even when editing an email in “plain text” mode. I'm guessing the style lookup is handled at a much lower level, where there's no knowledge of plain text existing. (You can also see odd behavior when pasting formatted text into Outlook Express in plain text mode: The plain text is simply not honored (well, when it's sent it is, but not while viewing the message).

Just one of those things that never fails to annoy me.