ok, I did not see that forum, so I will post there after this post. Thank you Mike. i am hopefully going to be more involved with arcpy.mapping, this is only my second day since beta10 using arcpy.mapping, so bear with me.
The mxd points to SDE data, file GB locally, UNC over a network, and there are about 15 broken links. opening the mxd, is pretty slow, so it may not be just arcpy.mapping. Broken Links and UNC are probably the biggest culprits. i am thinking the speed of the mxd with the broken links, is akin to what we experienced at 9.3 or 9.3.1 where there was a perf hit when you had broken links.
What I mean by printing is not actual printing of the mxd, but printing the list, so I can see the data, so see about replaceWorkspaces. Is it possible to loop through layers and for the replaceWorkspacePath or the finadAndReplace...use the lyr.dataSource as the input, in place of the actual path, is that feasible?