Program speed

I have a 30 slide project that I am working on.  I have roughly 29 slides that are fairly basic, an image on the slide inside a scroll bar that links back to a "home" slide.  One of my slides needs to have all of the images in this project on it.  Again, the images are located within a scroll bar and the slide it's self links back to a "home" slide.  I should mention that there is a "thumbnail" image of each image, so that as you click on that thumbnail, it displays the image larger on the screen. 

My issue is on this slide that contains roughly 30 images.  The slide is very slow to process what I ask it to do when in development.  Every click is painfully slow...to the point that when I need to replace the 30 images, it takes me 1-2 hours.  Is this a program flaw due to the amount of information on the screen?  It appears that my system is not overtaxed, but my IT department did suggest it might be the program.  What specs would I need to handle a project of this nature? 

I should mention that when published, the program runs fine.  No delays or hang ups in waiting for the images to load.