> Did you by any chance create a password protected account and enabled
> encryption of personal files? I recently did this and things in
> general were dog slow, so much that I removed the password to get rid
> of the encrypting (did not seem to be an option just to stop
> encryption).
>
No idea... It's a prepared version of XP... I'll have a look in the 
settings, but don't really know where.

Thanks anyway for the answer ;)