Well, I spoke too soon. Now, each time I RUN the project, it's a 1 in 4 chance (or maybe better) that I'll go into the "Not Responding" mode for up to 2 minutes. Then it kicks in and all is well.
I moved the project to the C drive. It seemed to help at first but I hadn't given it a good enough test drive.
Then I added 4 gigs of memory to my rather puny 4 gig machine. Now there's plenty of memory but no speed improvement.
I wonder if the project is spending time linking the project library up or something but it makes no sense to me that about 3/4 times, it runs fast as ever. There's really no pattern to it that I can discern ... as of yet, anyway.
Anyone with any suggestions would be appreciated.