Sorry to hear that, man. I always seem to have a stall while the program itself is loading, but I do have a lot of patterns and brushes and styles to go through but not nearly as many as as I used to. Slowing when loading or saving is only a problem when my file gets over 2 gigs (in PS memory but only 600 megs in actual disk space). So if you're having this problem on nearly every file then it's something I haven't heard of or experienced, thank goodness. If you find the root of the problem and the fix be sure to let us know so that we can avoid such things ourselves.