For those of you who read through all of these answers and did all of these things to no avail, I have another thing for you to try that worked for me. Like you, I read and did all of these things and they didn't help.
In my case, Office 2010 version of Excel (32bit) on Windows 7, the program would freeze for MINUTES not seconds.
I noticed that the amount of RAM that Excel.exe was using would approximately triple while the program was frozen, and that dwm.exe was using about one core of CPU (12-13% on a quad-core w/ HT versus 1-3%). I used Process Explorer and took a complete dump of Excel while it was frozen, then installed and ran WinDBG (good beginner guide which is all I used found here), and learned that there was "heap corruption".
In this case, Windows updates hadn't been applied for YEARS, and I found out Service Pack 2 for Office 2010 was one of them (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39667). This computer was also being offered an update KB3078667 which has to do with a memory leak that occurs in Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe).
After installing and rebooting, the problem went away. Hope this helps somebody else out there, as it's not just exclusive to Office 2010.
This security bulletin is applicable, look at it and see if you have this update installed or a superseding one that has one of these in it, if not, installing one of these may ameliorate your problem.