More than 90% of the time is spent in “Creating media pages”. It takes no more than 45 minutes to reach that stage, and only a few minutes to complete the report after that stage completes.
I saw some comments in the code that made me think it was creating reduced resolution images, but I’ve never found where they are being stored. But maybe that is the problem. The options I’ve been using for the Dynamic Web Report generates image and thumb directories that are practically identical to the images and thumb directories generated by the Narrated Web Report. (The only differences are the nine icon and background files Narrated Web Report includes in the images directory.)
Yet the Dynamic Web Report takes less than 10% of the time it takes to generate the Narrated Web Report. That was the reason I originally suspected it was the generation of the References section because that was the only extra information included in the Narrated Web Report.
So it is beginning to sound like the Narrated Web Report may be wasting a lot of time generating reduced resolution images that are never used.