Well, thanks for trying and welcome to the club! I've scanned around a bit and it seems that there are numerous people who have the same or similar problems (also includes things like the computer taking a long time to respond to the command to shut down or hibernate), and there are a lot of suggestions regarding RAM size, startup config, disk defragmentation, spyware infestations, virus checkers etc etc, but it's all stuff which IMHO has nothing to do with this problem (my computer's performance is otherwise satisfactory, which wouldn't be true if one of these other causes was at work) and certainly no one seems to have the appropriate silver bullet ... - Mannat