Links to other parts of Word 2010 document take forever to work

I have a table of contents with 7 links to other sections of the document. When I click on one of the links, it takes about a full minute for it to work, thus defeating the purpose of having it linked.

Why does it take so long and is there a way to fix this?

I tried saving it as a Word 97-03 document which made the links work faster, but that screwed up the text alignment on every page. I tried to manually fix it, but text that used to appear on one page is now spread across two pages.

Your description suggests you have either a faulty Office installation or a corrupt document. You could try repairing the Office installation (via Start > Windows Control Panel > Programs > Programs & Features > Microsoft Office (version) > Change > Repair). You could also try 'repairing' the document, by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it. Note also that you'll get better performance with a Table of Contents inserted via Insert|Quick Parts|Field>TOC than with the building block version inserted via References|Table of Contents.