Yeah, I don't know what the deal is. I think our corporate config is just a pig. The machine was a 1.5 GHz P4, with 512MB RAM. One problem was that they seems to push patches and updates to us on a near-daily basis, and while that happened, the system would swap constantly.

There were some other network things involved too. When I pull the plug and boot up, I can be loaded and responsive in ~4-5 minutes as well.