Hi Tech. Thanks for your suggestions.
I'm actually glad no one else is reporting it if that really means I am the only one who has experienced this.
I wouldn't describe it as a freeze. It takes a long but consistently predictable time for the menu selection to be responded to, and even though the selection appears to have been made, the red advisory text and the check box will remain out of synch with the apparent selection seemingly forever, i.e. until you remake the same selection and get the correct response.
Otherwise the machine works fine. I've turned off "Show shadows under menus" and "Show window contents while dragging" and that seems to reduce but not completely eliminate the delay.
PC Specs:
ECS K7S5A (SIS735 ATA100 chipset)
Athlon XP 1800+ (1533mhz)
Winfast A170 (nVidia MX440) AGP video
512MB DDR RAM