Extremely slow IDE startup and read/write over 250Megs for small project

I have a small project with a few hundred classes and using a couple dozen jar files.  My computer is 2GHB 2007 vintage with 2GB RAM on Windows XP SP2. I am only running IJ right now (rebooted the machine).  But it is taking over TEN MINUTES to load this small project.   Mostly this time is spent displaying the dialog "Scanning Files".

I am using IJ 7.0.3 .

For reference: on another similar model computer, it takes about two minutes to load a much larger project.

1.  Why are 250 Megs being read and written on startup?
2.  What gives here in terms of this ridiculous start up time ?