I used to have Office 2010 installed on my Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit PC. It never gave me any problems. I upgraded to Office 2013 (32-bit - 15.0.4535.1006) awhile back and Word and Outlook started continuously freezing whenever I was editing a document or email. If I am just reading email, it is fine. When I click on Forward or Reply, or compose a new email, it freezes for at least 15 seconds, and often much longer. I may get a few words typed before it freezes the 1st time, but it always does. If I keep typing, or try to click somewhere else in the app, it will eventually tell me the program is not responding. After it comes back, I may get a couple of sentences out, but it will eventually freeze again. A simple 10 second email often takes several minutes to complete.
It doesn't matter if the email is in the preview pane, or if I click the Pop Out button to have it in its own window. It also doesn't matter if I open Outlook in Safe Mode or not.
I found kb article 921541. After using the Fixit tool from there and changing the default printer to the MS XPS printer, Word seems to be working. So it would seem, even though it is the same problem in both Office apps, and they started locking up at the same time, the problems are unrelated.