RE: Other security software
Yes, I did a fresh reinstall only a short while before posting the problem because I had seen the earlier posting that the problem had been corrected.
I've been running avast for several months but the problem pre-dates it. Previous to avast I used CA. Since I posted the problem I've noticed that Spybot might be considered to be loading a tiny bit faster, but not by much.
I also very recently had my machine tweaked by a friend / IT professional because it was running very slowly overall. It now zooms along like greased lightening on every application except S&D.
It occurs to me to run Task Manager while loading S&D; I have a suspicion that the loading process itself is a resource hog; yes? no? maybe?