photoshop 7 freezes temporarily when loading images

just as of today, photoshop has started taking forever (2-3 minutes) to load images of any size. i've tried opening them from the file browser, dragging and dropping them into photoshop, etc... and it appears to load the image but then it freezes (goes to not responding) for 2-3 minutes and then loads up and works fine. i'm running photoshop 7 on a P4 2.8ghz laptop with windows XP pro and 512 mb of ram. i've never had a problem with this before though. usually, photoshop runs lightning fast for me.