Heh. Found the solution. I had a 256 MB swap file and programs like Open Office were being written block by block to the swap and that made the delay - it wasn't the CD at all. I dumped the swapfile and upped the memory on each machine to 756 MB. Virtually instant now. Oh, man! A silent computer the size of a VCR with an OS and settings that can't corrupt. It doesn't get any better than that, does it?