Digital BW, The Print

Is there a common reason why Photoshop 7 should all of a sudden take an 
extraordinarily long time to load, and sometimes fail to load at all?  It 
was doing fine this afternoon, but this evening when I tried to open it (to 
do some B&W prints using Lyson Quad Black on my Canon S9000) I've had it 
fail to load several times and on another occasion took about 4 minutes to 
load (felt like a half hour, of course.)

It has always taken longer to load than any other program I use, but I can 
see that it loads up a ton of stuff at the start - I watch the items flash 
by on the startup screen.  But this evening there are several places where 
it seems to get hung up on a plug-in - I remember Bas-Relief sat on the 
screen for what seemed like forever, and there were several others where 
the loading process just seemed to stop for a while.  Eventually it 
finished and my image manipulation seemed to work at normal speed, but 
clearly something is wrong.  I didn't do anything particular to the 
computer that I can remember - I just have Eudora and Internet Explorer 
open most of the time.  I don't leave Photoshop open all the time, just 
open it when I'm ready to do some image work.

Anything obvious to check to get back to "normal?"

Thanks for any ideas.

Cheers,
Kip