Word demo background process causes disk activity?

While attempting to track down the cause of some unexplained disk activity, a reader discovered that it was caused by a background process associated with running MS Word v.X demo. Bill Miller writes:

"I've been playing with the trial version of MS Word for OS X Word, at least this demo, appears to spawn a second process that continues to run even after one quits Word. Moreover, this second process causes disk activity every 2 seconds or so.

I confirmed this behavior by starting Terminal and running Top, then launching Word. A process associated with Word appears - then a second process named 'Microsoft' is spawned, after which these brief, periodic disk accesses commence. Quit word, and this second process continues running indefinitely, along with the disk activity. Kill the process and the disk activity stops."

Unfortunately we don't have an explanation for what is going on here. We use the release version of Office v.X, and see the 'Microsoft' process as well. We have always assumed that the MS process was associated with the background notifier that handles reminders for Entourage, however, on our setup at least, the process does not appear to be causing any unusual disk activity.