Problem opening/reading .MHT file

I have a file in .MHT format and I'm having a heck of a time reading it. So far, I have only been able to open it successfully with Universal Viewer, and when it finally opened, my CPU usage for Universal Viewer went up to 95% and stayed between 95% and 100%, slowing everything to a crawl. I couldn't even navigate thru the .MHT file due to serious lag. I have tried to open the file with Internet Explorer, PaleMoon/FireFox, Chrome, Word2003, and in each instance, the exact same thing happens: CPU usage skyrockets to 95-100% immediately, this happens before the document is even open; there will be an empty IE (or Word, whatever) window and the CPU is at 98%, and I have to wait at least 3-4 minutes (usually more) for the document to completely open (if it ever does open before I get fed up and terminate the process via Task Mgr). There are hyperlinks within the document, and when I try to open one of those, well, it's the same story; it takes 3-5 minutes for one of the links to open. What gives? Is there something I'm missing with this .MHT file?

 

From reading here http://www.file-extensions.org/mht-file-extension

sure seems like these files have lots of junk in them. Maybe a few of the links are outdated and that's why it takes forever for the file to open; it is busy searching for all the bits and pieces.

 

It's all text (no animation, no graphical images, etc). I haven't looked at the whole thing, but it scrolls 3-4 full 1920x1080 windows from left to right, but then it's at least 40 full-screen windows from top to bottom, so it is large in visual size, but under 8.5mb in file size....

That makes sense, but the links inserted in to the file are just links, just underlined text links to PDF files on a local University site and a govt Geological site (maybe local?); the links aren't "active" and don't display a picture or anything. This file is a list of mining properties and their histories from as far back as 1850 thru about 1959. With the price of gold being so high, I've had a lot of side work from clients researching possible gold claims and sites (I live in the western USA very close to Calif gold country and near Virgina City NV, and there's a LOT of gold being found in various areas in a 200 mile radius from my city, so there's a LOT of mining interest here, metal detectors finding multi-ounce nuggets at old abandoned mines that were considered "worked out" by the old timers). One client wants me to download all the linked PDF files from the .MHT file and burn 'em to a disc (he couldn't figure out how to open the .MHT).

I was working on a fairly low end XP system when I first looked at the .MHT file, I'll try it again on my home PC which has much more juice available.

THX!