Hi Vince,
There seems to be something inherent in the project settings. I copied the project file and all the media to another computer, reassigned the pointers to the new media, allocated scratch files on other HDs, etc. erased the prefs file, and still, the same thing. Anything I do on the timeline requires about 10 seconds. This never happened to me before. The only thing I can think of is that I did a clean install of Windows XP and PP 2.0. ( even re-installed PP). Something is wired. I have used my current computer for many PP projects and this never happened before.
Joe