Well, I inserted a page break, rearranged the text that described the visio object (Figure #1), deleted the object from the doc and pasted into a new Visio drawing then moved it back into the document on the blank page.

Lo and behold, the document doesn't choke word down when I scroll. Unfortunately, however, the document is owned by the legal departments of two separate corporate entities who most likely won't accept the change to the format.

Oh, well. Sometimes you're the windshield...