WORD hangs on paste of HTML

I have WORD 2000 installed, as a component of Office 2000. When I attempt to paste HTML from a net page into a WORD document, WORD accesses the net (outgoing) for every "line "pasted. My perception is that this has something to do with virus detection, but a cursory glance has not revealed how to turn this "feature" off, or even what exactly the origin is of the access attempts. My guess is that this is likely unnecessary, and whereas it used to simply be time consuming, I have recently begun to encounter WORD hanging up when this occurs. Does anyone know if this is a necessary evil, and how to turn off whatever is doing this…? And why WORD would start to stall in this situation after installing Kerio Personal Firewall (appears to be in a loop if access is permitted it just keeps asking, but if denied, WORD hangs…)?

 

Thanks, Arie, but I have a workaround also, by selecting EDIT, PASTE SPECIAL, then UNFORMATTED TEXT or something other than HTML, so FYI that might be quicker than NOTEPAD, but the bottom line is either way you lose the HTML, which in some cases I prefer to keep.

In retrospect, ADDITIONALLY wondering if I manage to disable the access, which I am assuming is related to a virus check(?), what is the probability of then opening up myself to some kind of an intrusion from the HTML in a web page????