Long delay opening a workbook through our Intranet for some users

Hi,

We have 5 sites and in one of them about half the users have a very slow
response time when opening a small (386kb) excel file through our Intranet
that is
located at a central site. Normally it takes between 3-8 seconds to open
that file but the users having that problem it takes between 30 seconds and
up to 2 minutes sometimes.

I have found that the file has hyperlinks to other files on the same server
and if I remove the hyperlinks then the file opens quickly for everyone.

Is there an option in Excel that will ignore these Hyperlinks so that the
opening of the file remains at a decent lenght of time ?

We run XP Sp2 and IE 6.0 and Office 2003 Sp2

Regards,