Hi guys
this has been a most useful thread.
I followed the advice of Naples Air Center and and did a virus check with Housecall, it worked, 51 viruses. All but 5 of them were deleted after the Housecall scan but the other 5 were active and had to be turned off in Task Manager before they could also be deleted.
Needless to say the laptop is now singing and my A4 page of closely typed script is printing in 3 seconds.
Thanks Proxus for the specific advice, I also found -24.exe and -27.exe viruses. I deleted the FOO.exe application, nothing has happened yet.
Thank you all
Sultan Ismail