Bret,
Since I post my question I have been speaking to a
number of developers in our organisation. They tell
me that the same problem is apparent in the new version
of Access. The reason for this is that the new application
has been developed in a higher level language then
the previous Development environments, Access and FoxPro 2.x
This is the case for portability reasons. This is why
the new Development systems run slowly on a lower spec
machine. According to Microsoft the patch which is
available (ver3.0b) will cause forms to load 10 to 20%
faster. This not enough. There are still a lot of
486's out there which are perfectly adequate.

Please keep in contact if you hear anything else.

Regards,

Justin