[Darryl Ramm]

Lots of discussions on DUC in the past about the two main causes of these type of symptoms.

You upgraded from what?

Remove any media in CD/DVD-ROM drives.

If Windows Device Manager shows floppy drives delete/uninstall the driver, yes even if you don't gave any actual floppy drives.

Very likely to be the above, but if it's not that then go for broke: move all plugins out of the plugin folder, trash prefs, disable auto save, and test with a new empty session and see if you can get that to behave OK. Still stuck post a SiSoft Sandra report.