Thanks, all. I'm retiring that user profile on the machine, I think it's something corrupted about that user profile. It's just another symptom that something is wrong with it. Already the profile was loading exceedingly slowly and had grown to excessive proportions, and in fact I wanted to back up the passwords just so I could use them on the new profile. Ah well, I'll just type them all in again. (There were many many dozens, maybe that was the problem to begin with.)

By the way, regarding user profiles... Note to all programmers everywhere: Placing your CACHE and BACKUP files in the user profile folder is a bad bad idea for corporate users whose user profiles must synch to a file server over a network.

You'd think only rookies would make that mistake. Rookies like Google Earth? Microsoft Virtual Earth? iTunes? Gr. The user profile folder was 5 gigs.