6.2 Firewall on XP Pro SP3 - GUI issues

I have manually upgraded from the V5 free firewall to the 6.2.282872.2847 free firewall.

I had no issues with the upgrade and all rules that were present in V5 are now active in V6.2, great!

I’m running a Dell desktop with Win XP Pro SP3 32 bit, 4GB RAM, Quad Core - loads of free disk space.

What I have noticed though is that my system is generally running slower.

Example specifics: when I open the Comodo GUI, it takes a full 5 seconds minimum for the GUI to appear whereas the old GUI would appear almost immediately.

Openhardwaremonitor.exe no longer works; I can run it but the GUI never appears properly no matter how long I wait.

VMWare Player takes a long time for the GUI to appear, significantly longer than when running Comodo firewall V5.

Right mouse click on My Computer and select Properties and the dialogue takes >10 seconds to appear whereas it was more or less immediate before.

All slowness seems to be related to the appearance of program GUIs.

I haven’t applied any other changes at the same time so I feel the new issues are down to the Comodo firewall upgrade.

Anyone else experiencing similar or is it just my system?

Any suggestions as to changes I might try before taking the decision to downgrade?