Thanks for your more detailed explanation of your particular situation.
I am afraid that there is some other variable that has not been discussed in this thread that contributes to or causes this lag time in Publisher 2013 for some users. As I said before I do not have this problem with my installation of Pub 2013 and have not
been able to recreate it. Some users experience it, some don't and some like John Duxbury boot up one day and find the problem gone.
I would like to hear from you if hiding the pictures and working with just picture placeholders does alleviate the problem for you. I still tend to think that at least one big part of this problem is with how Publisher 2013 handles graphics
and the changes made along with the removal of the Fast Zoom picture option.
With that said Pub 2013 has proven to be very buggy and is failing a lot of people in a lot of ways and if you have the option of moving back to Pub 2010 or even older then that might be your best choice. Many say that Pub 2007 was the best version. Though
the older versions are no longer 'supported' I actually use Pub 2000 and 2003 for the majority of my production work. Given your part time needs, look around on Ebay and elsewhere and you might find an inexpensive older copy and that would work for you. You
can even do a custom install and run both the older version and Pub 2013 at the same time.
Other frustrated users have moved to Serif PagePlus which has a free version http://www.serif.com/desktop-publishing-software/ .
Download the free version and within a few weeks Serif will start sending you offers of huge discounts on their most current paid versions.
Another free option is Scribus :
http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus
LibreOffice 4.0 also free and supports importing Microsoft Publisher documents for the first time:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/08/libreoffice_40_ships/
Adobe InDesign: $20/month: https://creative.adobe.com/plans?single_app=indesign
Office 2016 and Publisher 2016 is now available for public preview and hopefully this problem will be fixed when the final product is RTM.
Note: do not install this beta unless you are willing to overwrite the Office installation currently on your computer. In fact most people should wait IMHO.
Main Blog - http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/04/office-2016-public-preview-now-available/
Instructions to get preview - https://products.office.com/en-us/office-2016-
Once again if you get the chance please let us know if hiding the pictures and working with just picture placeholders does alleviate the problem for you. Confirmation would help narrow down the cause of this issue. Sorry I cannot offer better solutions.
DavidF