quant: - In response to your question, I was, for the purpose of my investigation, "opening" a Word document inside UR, using the fact the Word can be embedded in IE. MSWord was not running at all during this investigation.

I assume from your observations about the behaviour of Word when you drag a Word file to IE, that what I am seeing is normal behaviour that is not considered to be "activating Word"? And so I must look elsewhere for the "Word quirk" that could be the cause of my problem.

Which is, as you will recall, that when MSWord is running in the background as a separate task, the (inactive) MSWord window appears on top of UR when I move away from a linked document that is visible in the version of Word embedded in the Browser/Item Details pane of UR.

That is to be expected -- when Word documents are edited internally in UR (UR hosts IE, which in turn hosts Word), a winword.exe process (where the Word functionality resides) will be created if it doesn't already exist. That's just how OLE embedding works.

To be more specific, UR will not activate an external Word instance/window. I'm not sure why an external Word instance is being activated/redrawn in your case, but UR itself is not doing it.