[h-e-w] Slowdown on Emacs 24.3 (Windows)

[Elizabeth Wootten]

Hello,

I downloaded the precompiled version of emacs 24.3  just after it was
released in March, and it all worked fine for me on Windows 7. Since then,
it's been gradually slowing down - slow to start up, slow to respond to
commands, hanging while entering text, etc. 

In the past few weeks it's gone from "that seems a bit slow" to taking
around 15 minutes between running the .exe file and getting a usable-looking
window. Since it takes around 15 minutes to open a file, too, it's not that
usable :(

To start it, I usually run the runemacs.exe directly. Running emacs.exe from
a command line behaves in exactly the same way. I don't see any error
messages, either during running or on exit.

I've poked around in the Windows file structure but haven't (yet) found any
obvious piles of temporary files which are being created or anything like
that. Rebooting Windows doesn't seem to make any difference to performance.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what might be causing this? 

Many thanks,
Elizabeth