See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=830561 "Documents that
have attached templates take a long time to open in Word 2002 and
in Word 2003".

Dieter Reuther wrote:
We retired an older file server, which held all our Word templates. Opening a
Word file linked to a template on that retired server now takes about 5
minutes. Word must be looking all over the place for the missing templates.

Any tips how to fix this problem?

Thanks,
Dieter Reuther