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I found it a simple matter to open a panel on the bottom of the laptop and clean out the accumulation of lint I found in the heat-sink.
But although a cooler CPU certainly couldn't hurt and may indeed extend the life of this machine, I later found something else that I now think is the real cause of my troubles. I noticed that the icon for AVG had an animation moving almost all the time. Its control center interface came up slowly (as has most all programs) and I saw that the Updater had been running since I'd started the computer over five hours earlier. Then, I found that the updater had been denied access to the internet by ZoneAlarm. Despite the agonizingly slow response, I finally was able to disable the automatic update in AVG, and after rebooting, have seen a wonderful improvement in response time.
I'll certainly report back in a couple of days, but for now it looks to me as though my problem was extra-slow response due to the thrashing of AVG update. I am wondering if I'll have to re-install AVG or ZoneAlarm (or both) to allow regular updates.
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Yes I think that it is worth trying to reinstall AVG because enabling auto updates shouldn't cause that. Looks like a corrupted installation to me.
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I've removed both ZoneAlarm and AVG, then reinstalled AVG. I'll put ZoneAlarm back on in the next day or two although I'm still wondering in the back of my mind whether the problem was strictly with AVG or inan incompatibility with ZoneAlarm. The uninstall of AVG was balky; I had to download their uninstaller as the regular SetUp uninstall couldn't get everything off.
Now, the good news. This seems to have solved the hangs. Thank you very much for your support. It's most appreciated.