Users outside our organization are reporting that a document we distributed is sluggish, due to the file trying to link back to the template. But there's no such explicit link: in the "Templates and Add-ins" dialog box, "Automatically update document styles" is NOT ticked. The document was originally created from a template that resides on a network drive, not a local one. Is this "phoning home" behavior somehow by design?

Couple questions:

• Must all Word files created from templates be done so with the template saved locally, to prevent this from happening?
• Does Word basically assume that if a document was created with a local template, it won't try to "phone home" when the doc is shared but will assume you do if it detects a network path?
• So far, the only way I've been able to fix the issue is to mess with the XML (settings.xml.rels) -- is there another way?

Thank you