This is one of those weird things that I stumbled upon so I thought I would write it down in case anyone else has the same issue.
I have a customer that has dozens of different MS Word files that they use to print forms. Each file is just one or two pages, just text, nothing fancy. They had 3 files that would take a very long time to open. All of the other files would open instantly, but these 3 would take 10 or more seconds to open. It turns out that these files were based on a template that no longer existed. The template reference also appeared to reference a server that was not on their network. Once I removed the reference to the template, the files opened instantly.
So how do you remove the reference? Well, if you have Word 2007 you can click on the Office button | Prepare |Inspect Document and make sure that the Document Properties and Personal Information checkbox is checked. If the file is based on a template, you will get the chance to remove it.
In older versions of Word, the only way I could find to fix it was to cut & paste the contents of the document to a new document.
You can see if your document is based on a template by checking the Summary tab of the document's properties page.
