/3/ - 3DCG

Could I get a little help here because I've really fucked up.
I was having an issue with the strings a little while back which I managed to fix. However, I noticed that Blender was hanging when I was loading the file. I checked my statistics and this one model has 1.1m faces. I checked where they were all coming from and found out the strings account for 1.04m of those faces.
Is there an easy way to cut this number down on the strings? Would the ol' high poly to low poly trick make any difference here because I always thought that was for more complex models.
I also know I always make long rambling posts, and I'm sorry for that, but I like to put as much information in as I can to cut down on the back and forth so as not to shit up the thread too much.