Just took the bull by the horns and cleared out all progs not used any more, binned the macAfee firewall and activated the Win XP one instead, binned NAV and it now runs at the speed of light. Noticed also that Adaware said there were 44 processes running before all this and now only 23!
I get the feeling it was NAV which seemed to do too much in the background!
Cheers all,
mcdhu