FWIW, I have at least one document with over 100 citations, plus 67 bibliography references, and those have little effect on its performance. I suspect something else is/was going on with your document.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

anything's possible after a clean windows installation. for some reason if not the above things are MUCH faster and the incessant repaginating has stopped. depending on how long i live, the source list will grow indefinitely and i no longer trust word's system...i'm glad it's gone. fortunately this isn't a dissertation--source sequencing is hardly a concern. thanks again.