Well, yes, the hard drive is in desparate need of some cleanup. Lots of unneeded, undeleted binaries, that sort of thing; the disk is probably a veritable patchwork of free vs. used space. Thanks for all your tips.
(It's not as bad as it once was. I once had to install Oracle Server on my machine to do some testing; it took up so much disk space, I ran out of virtual memory! Since then, I can't recall if I've defragged.)
I'll try some serious disk maintenance, then see if it's still an issue. It's just that as I noted, oddly, processor/memory-intensive juggernauts like Word seem to run fine; it's these small, humble programs that seem to take long to do things.
Of course, to really start afresh, there's always
but MIS would have a fit.