Editor Becomes Extremely Unresponsive with Large-ish Post

I’m working on a lengthy keyboard review right now using the built-in visual editor. It’s around 3000 words and includes about a dozen images. The images are ~300K apiece (about 1050 width each, dynamically shrunk in the post and linking to the full-size image). I use header fonts in a couple of places and have a single page break and a single “more” break. No tags or anything yet because I can’t even edit them anymore.

Any click takes 10-20 seconds to register on the page, if it does at all. Text takes upwards of a minute to appear while typing. It will hard-lock a browser if I look at it funny. It behaves identically in Chrome (latest version), Firefox 3.5 (latest release of that version), and Firefox Beta 4. I don’t have any kind of nasty plugins running in these browsers, especially FF4.

My PC is a quad-core 3ghz with 4 gigs of RAM; it’s hardly a lightweight. I have a couple of gigs of free ram at any given time and the WP tab only takes about ~150 megs of RAM up on its own in Chrome, yet cycles between 200 and 350 megs in Firefox 4! Nonetheless, it maxes a core of my processor the entire time it’s open (my browsers don’t seem to support multiple cores).

So tell me, is my post salvageable? Is there anything I can do to save it and edit it reasonably? None of the WordPress desktop clients I’ve downloaded seem to “understand” the various bits of code that WP inserted into it with its editor (like the caption boxes around images and the like), so that seems like it’s right out. I don’t think we’ve got any funky plugins running in WP, either–a comment filter is about all I know of for sure.

Is this typical behavior? Is there something my post might include that would cause this? Is there a desktop wordpress client that fully supports all the funky stuff the web editor can create that will let me muck with this post? Gah, help!

Thanks in advance 🙂