[CentOS] CentOS 5.5 latest revisions seem really slow

I recently updated to OpenOffice 3.2 and I noticed that it, and the latest Evolution, seem to be incredibly slow for some operations.

E.g., in OO, about half the time when I'm editing something, it takes anywhere from 10-30 seconds for OO to respond to a click on one of the icons or menu items, and Evo is taking forever to format messages.

During these times the gnome-system-monitor icon on my panel is showing almost no activity, and if I expand it to the full window, it shows the same.

Is anyone else seeing this?

I'm running the x86_64 release on an Athlon II X4, 2.6GHz with 4GB of memory and lots of available space in memory and on disk.

Thanks in advance.

Mark