This morning I decided that enough time had passed since the latest round of Windows "security updates" had been issued to allow Microsoft to address the issues that had been reported by the early adopters.
So I updated my system with all of them.
On re-boot things seemed OK... no trouble getting new messages through Outlook, no trouble accessing a remote-defined network drive and moving data back and forth, etc.
Later I started Internet Explorer for my regular fix of UT. The thing just sat there interminable, the little green progress doo-hickeys at about 3 of them and not really moving. Remembering last week's "UT slowness" I tried another site (Fox Wiki) with same result. Same for Google too.
So I restored to a yesterday checkpoint. Lo and behold, Internet Explorer was back to normal after the re-boot!
Sure looks like it was the update that caused the problem and it pees me off that MS either didn't fix the problem or take the bad one out of the update. It's not like they didn't have the time to do so!

EOR