I tried a quick scan with both avast and Defender turned off. Still 30 minutes. I only have 384 meg of ram on this machine, so I tried a quick scan from safe mode. 37 minutes. Go figure.
I don’t know what else to try, so, I think that I’ll file this whole matter under “Questions I spent too much time on, that really didn’t mean anything”.
My thanks to you and the others for your comments.