Hyperlinks not transferring from MS Word to RH

I currently have a Word review process which might at least help smooth things for you. No silver bullets unfortunately.

We review in Word with track changes turned on so we can see the updates for existing topics.

For updates to topics I mostly retype the content in RH, as the changes are relatively small and don't take too much time to do.

For new topics, or significantly changed existing topics I do the following:

1. Make a copy of the word document and make sure all the track changes have been accepted or rejected.
2. Apply a special macro-enabled template. This template has styles with names matching the RH styles I use, plus a few additonaly ones I use in some cleanup macros. The macros do things like replace smart quotes with straight quotes, remove manual page breaks and section breaks, remove blank paragraphs, replace non-breaking spaces with regular space, replace text boxes with plain text and add a commen to check they converted properly, make all images inline and a bunch of other things I came across over the years.
3.  Run through the document dealing with any last little tracked changes that were missed, or typos, and applying the correct styles as necessary.
4. In a temporary project, import the cleaned Word document. I suggest temporary, in case something goes wrong with the import or scripts. That way you don't risk messing up your production project.
5.  Run some scripts on the imported content to clean up some Word crud. (I believe the New UI import is much cleaner, so you might not need this step.) I also have one to remove the search string code from any RH links, which my SMEs might have copied in - these can mess with the google analytics results, if you're using that, so I strip off anything after the .htm part of the url.
6.  Clean up any formatting in the topic that didn't apply correctly on import.
7. Apply your production css file to all topics.
8. Import new topics into your production project - answer "No" to the dialog asking to import the css file so you don't to overwrite your production css with an old copy.
9. For updates to existing topics that I've chosen to do this way, I copy the content manually into the topic, so I don't end up with incorrect duplicate topics.
10. Apply the hyperlinks and add any RH specific things like topic toc etc. Depending on how the links were done in Word, some of the links should be there and you just need to replace hard-coded website part with one or more ../ to make the link relative in the project. You might be able to do a couple of find/replace actions on the topics to fix those, but will need to be careful to get the right number of ../ for each link. (I can't check at the moment, because I'm getting a weird error trying to run the import - some update seems to have broken something.)

The Word macros aren't necessary but they do help streamline things I you have the expertise. I'm not sure what, if any scripts might be needed in RH New UI. Mine are for Classic and the entire scripting language changed and is essentially undocumented, so I can't offer any advice.

Anyway, that looks horrifyingly long, but it actually works pretty well to get clean topics with less work. 

And remember, changes to existing topics I mostly just retype as it often ends up being as quick as trying to automate anything. Just significant rewrites get the above treatment,

I would kind of expect internal ones to break since you're moving the location from where the Word doc is to where the RH topic is and unless they have maintained the same relative path to each other, the destination filename would change. Is this also happening to external links that are already well formed HTML URLs?