Has anyone else seen this as a problem:

Dashboard Excel charts stored in SharePoint are linked to a Word doc
created in SharePoint. The document saves fine. But when we try to
open it back up in SharePoint it opens Word, and then seem to hang. We
let it run for 10 minutes and killed the Word program via Task Master.
Tried it several times same results.

Created a document with out the links, it opens up right away.

If we save the document to a local computers drive and open it up with
the links in it, it opens up right away.

Sort of defeats the idea of collaboration in SharePoint.

Anybody have any ideas of why this may be happening and maybe even a
solution???