Two Nearly Identical Workstations--1 with 'not responding' problems on PS Startup

Question

We have two similar editing workstations on which we run Adobe CS3 products as follows:
SYSTEM 1
Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6
XFX PVT80GTHF9 GeForce 8800GTS 640MB
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Mushkin Hp2-6400 Ddr2 4gb Kit
Western Digital Caviar HD 500G|WD 7K 16M SATA2 WD5000AAKS
SILVERSTONE TEMJIN SST-TJ06S-W Silver Aluminum
Seasonic S12 Energy Plus SS- 650HT Power Supply
LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray Burner
HP LP3065 30" LCD Display
Turtle Beach Montego DDL 7.1 Dolby Digital
Pioneer DVR-112D
NEC Beige 1.44MB 3.5" Floppy Drive Model FD1231H
ZALMAN 9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
Black Magic Design Blackmagic Design BINTSPRO Intensity Pro
Contour Shuttle-Pro
SYSTEM 2
Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6
Quadro FX4600 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Mushkin Hp2-6400 Ddr2 4gb Kit
Western Digital Caviar WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA Hard Drive
SILVERSTONE TEMJIN SST-TJ06S-W Silver Aluminum
Seasonic S12 Energy Plus SS- 650HT Power Supply
HP LP3065 30" LCD Display
AuzenTech Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Card
Pioneer DVR-116D
NEC Black 1.44MB 3.5" Floppy Drive Model FD1231H
ZALMAN 9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
Contour Shuttle-Pro
Both systems are running Win XP SP2 and are behind 'walled gardens' on our LAN, a private sub-net of workstation computers with no internet access (we have office computers for browsing and e-mail).
While the two PCs are very similar, note that sound and video cards are different. Also system 2 does not yet have a Blu-ray writer.
System 1 works great with all of the Adobe apps.
System 2 experiences lengthy 'hangs' upon launch of several Adobe apps, including PhotoShop, Acrobat and, to a lesser extent, Premiere. What exactly happens is upon launch, on system #2, PhotoShop loads to the workspace, but hangs just as the palettes are being created. Time to this point, 3 seconds. Then, 60 seconds passes. The application's status in Task Manager changes to Not Responding. More time passes. Then the application comes back to life and is responsive again.
On system #1, PhotoShop is ready to use in 3 seconds following the command to launch. The 90-second delay/hang does not occur.
Logical deduction would suggest that the possible culprits are the video or sound card, these being different.
I also note that when recording and playing audio in other applications, like SoundForge and WinAMP, momentary pauses or gaps in the audio playback and recording are noted. It takes about 30 minutes of listening to encounter one such hiccup. It was also discovered that during recording, samples were dropped, during an hour-long studio recording session. There is something not quite right with system #2.
I was curious if anyone found a correlation between the Auzentech sound card and similar behavior where the app hangs and stops responding. Or anyone with the FX4600 graphics card having this problem?
What could PhotoShop, Acrobat and Premiere be doing during startup that is resulting in the apps to stop responding for a while, then return to responsive state? I have been going nuts for 4 months troubleshooting and trying to fix this problem, with no results. I've turned off nearly every Windows service, checked Adobe preferences between the two machines, speed tested the RAID 0 arrays and system drives--all seems well--in fact, the 2nd workstation has faster hard drives than the first, so maybe it is a problem with some exotic timing issue where the data is available to PhotoShop too soon and it gets confused and hangs up for a while? I'm at a loss!

Answer 1

I don't like the way OpenType looks on screen. I know it has some advantages, like a larger character set, but the hinting, or lack thereof, makes low resolution imagers like screens and inkjet printers produce less than great output. And my investment in Adobe fonts is in the many thousands of dollars, purchased back around 1991. I prefer PostScript fonts by a wide margin over OTF and TTF.
WRT audio card, I removed the drivers, and installed RC8, the current version, but that did not help. I did note something curious though: rebooting with no audio drivers shaved 30 seconds off the boot time! The blue 'loading your personal settings screen' that usually stays up for 35 seconds, was there for 5 seconds then right to the desktop. It was the fastest I've ever gotten to the desktop on this machine. Once I installed RC8 drivers, the loading time became long again.
I can be certain there's no file fragmentation problems. The temp drive has about half a terabyte of free space on it, and in fact, of the 2TB of system storage, only about 10% is in use (new system).
But the latency is really noticeable with Sony SoundForge 9. Start playback and the wait can be anywhere from 1-3 seconds before play begins!
On the other workstation with the TurtleBeach Montego DDL, playback is instant when I hit Play. Never a delay that's perceivable. I just don't like the way the Auzentech works. It may even be responsible for the problems I had with Premiere CS4, which I gave up on in March after a concerted struggle to solve the playback issues there. But I seem to be not the only one suffering with that anomaly. Though my underlying feeling is that something is not right with this system's hardware combination. One or more peripherals is just not playing well with the software, I suspect.