Speeding up Word Mail Merge, called from Access?

[ChrisCalvert]

I run a mail merge that is used daily to merge a newly imported file with a form letter. There are normally in the range of 600 letters to send. The .mdb exists on a remote file server, as different employees need access to this.
Word and Access are installed on each workstation. However, the 'merge' portion of the process seems to run very slow. I would say almost a second per record. Could this be due to the database being remote? Can anyone think of a way to speed this up? Could the size of the .mdb have anything to do with it?

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.
-chris
---------------------------------------------------- John, I've been bad
and they're coming after me.
Done someone Wrong,
and I fear that it was me. -TMBG