Cetin,
As you rightly pointed out, too many calls to refresh() was the main cause for the grid becoming slow. After removing the unnecessary refresh calls, it seems to be working fine. Thanks for your additional tips too.

Another observation – Before removing ‘refresh’, I tested this form on 2-3 different PCs. What I found was, this problem was appearing only on the PCs having Arabic enabled Win98. Is there any workaround required for the Arabic enabled PCs?

Thanks,
Yashodhan.