Silly question for you ... is your drive partitioned? Or do you have a second drive in place? Adobe technotes will tell you not to place PhotoShop on the same partition or drive as your OS; by placing it seperately in its own partition or own drive, you increase its efficiency. What are your scratch disks set to; and how much RAM have you turned over to PhotoShop? Are you purging any temp files from your PhotoShop Ram or are you leaving it all in place? Last but not least how high have you set the cache levels?