Perhaps we can figure this out John.
I opened up Lr and copied a recent book to mess around with. As before, initially Lr performed wonderfully for about ten minutes, then it slowed down. When it slows, what happens is that the commands become painfully slow. For example, I was creating custom Auto Layout pages since this seemed to be related to kicking off the slowness (I don't think it is). When Lr bogs down what happens is that the text boxes that get put up do not properly display - they are just a box with no instructions in them. Then, once they do paint the commands, like using the scroll bar or giving the preset a new name are very slow.
Now here is where it gets really interesting. I had opened up the snipping tool and placed it over on my second monitor so that I could capture a screen shot of one of these instruction boxes in their crippled state. However, when you click on the "new" command of the snipping tool the unformed instruction box in Lr immediately populates and you can only take a screen shot of the fully formed box. I tried this with numerous commands and got very consistent results.
Attached is a screen shot and you can see that it is normal. However, this problem effects more than Lr. When I went to save the attached snipping tool image, the save box in Windows was not working properly and displayed a slowness very similar to what I was seeing in Lr. Furthermore, when I went to use spell checker (right click) in this very message, the spell checker box does not display correctly. Whatever this problem is, it starts with Lr but then effects the entire system.
It is possible that I have a memory issue, but it is not a lack of memory and I have run tests on the memory to confirm that there are not issues with it. Whatever it is, it is impacting the ability to execute commands across the whole computer and requires a re-boot to clear. Any ideas?