Mouse clicks needed to keep downloads going

This week, I had a weird problem. It started while downloading my email. The initial symptom was that my data transfer stopped completely. But if I clicked the mouse, anywhere at all, another small portion of the download would transfer. It would then stop dead again. Every time I clicked the mouse, another bit of data transferred. I had to do this until all the mail was downloaded. I then had that the same thing occur in my web browser, when downloading web pages. After restarting the Mac, the problem went away. I was not going to mention this here on MacFixIt - but then yesterday I received the following email from Joseph Dien:

"I had a problem where the Mac would simply 'freeze' till a mouse click was applied. When downloading a page in Netscape, for example, it would download part of the page and then wait till I clicked somewhere. It would then download some more and wait again. I finally tracked this down using Peek-a-Boo. It turned out that Word 98 was grabbing half the CPU at these times even though it was quietly sitting in the background. When I quit Word, the 'freezes' stopped."

I cannot yet confirm that the same cause was behind my instance of this problem. But I probably did have Word 98 open at the time. On the other hand, I know there are many times when I have Word 98 open and have not had this problem. The mystery is not yet entirely solved for me.