pert:
I'm sorry to hear it didn't result in any improvement. Well at least the negative result tells us that accessing external folders is not the cause of the slowness. Unfortunately I'm out of ideas. The antivirus and the external folders are the only two potential causes of slowness I could think of. Hopefully someone else here will have another idea.
Sorry, this actually did work! I did the change late and didn't add the portable folder. I finally had time to go through this again and noticed the missing folder. Once added things sped up.
Thanks