Digital BW, The Print

Many thanks to those who responded to this query.  FWIW, I had rebooted 
several times yesterday after the problem surfaced,  to try to clean out 
lingering "crud" from memory, and I even modified the startup to not load 
some stuff that I didn't need to run Photoshop.  I also ran a little 
program I have called Mem Turbo, with which I can (supposedly) clean out 
RAM from time to time - it helped a lot when I was living (dying) with 
Windows ME, but XP Home seems to keep a fair amount of RAM available on its 
own (I have 512 Mb total available.)  My Norton Antivirus is up to date 
(except for the update message I got last night, which I haven't uploaded 
yet - but I've kept it current every time I get a reminder) and I didn't 
install any new programs (or do anything else except read email and check a 
few of my usual web destinations) between the time it was working properly 
and the time it started going screwy.

Now, the really weird thing - I just loaded up PS to see what the scratch 
disk situation was, and it loaded in a flash (under 30 seconds, just like 
it used to do.)  What does that say?

I had previously set a scratch disk on a second internal hard drive, but I 
remember that during one of the slow PS loadups I got a message that said I 
should do that.  When I went to look at the scratch disk setup just now, I 
found that all my choices had disappeared and the scratch disk was set to 
"Startup."  I've reset it back to D:, my second internal drive.

Related query - I also have an external firewire drive that I use mainly as 
a backup drive.  I've read somewhere that you shouldn't use external drives 
as scratch disks, but am wondering if it would make sense (or not) to 
designate this drive as the second choice for a scratch disk?  I have tons 
of extra space on it at the moment, and it seems to read and write quickly 
the few times I do manual file transfers to and from it.  Or is it better 
to just not specify a second scratch disk at all in PS?

Thanks again for the advice.  Now that things seem to be working again I 
may just leave well enough alone, although I have fixed the scratch disk 
situation and will do a defrag soon, just for good measure.  I don't have 
much else in the way of custom brushes, etc, that one writer mentioned.

Cheers,
Kip