Recently, my Photoshop CS6 has developed a quirk...it opens quickly, but the first action --opening a file or opening prefs, or anything --- results in 45 seconds to a minute of vigorous disk activity, after which everything runs as normal. I've trashed the prefs, and it made no difference. There was a NVidia driver update recently; I rolled back to the previous driver to no avail. Other than that, no system changes, cache changes or prefs changes.... this just started out of the blue. Anyone have any experience with this situation?

(Windows 7, Ivy Bridge processor, 32 gb ram, NVidia 680M graphics card, 40 gb SSD startup cache drive, 2 onboard drives with lots of space left. No changes to any settings before this started. Photoshop has 75% ram available, performance monitor shows only 4 gb in use as PS loads. All the other Creative Suite programs work normally, including Premiere, Bridge, After Effects, etc.)

I hesitantly installed PS CS5 on my Retina MBP running Mavericks as i was led to believe it would not work. It does, and further, this was offered as a solution against potential slowdown:

Go to the Application Menu (for example, Photoshop or InDesign), and choose Preferences > File Handling.
Under the Adobe Drive section, deselect Enable Adobe Drive.

Not sure it could help you on windows, but maybe worth a shot?

I must add that PS CS5 runs flawlessly for me so far on Mavericks, as does the old noise ninja plugin. Creative cloud can go fish.

Thanks for the input; that solution appears to be a Mac-thing only.

Actually, there appears to be no delay in loading from either drive after the initial delay. It appears that Photoshop has to stop and load a bunch of background stuff that it didn't load on program start. Everything freezes until it has quit it 's access. After that, there's no problem. I'm beginning to wonder if Photoshop bootup is in my SSD cache but some important part is left out, and it has to go searching for the rest. The SSD cache is fluid and changes, supposedly, in reference to what programs you use the most. It is annoying but, after a wait, it all works fine.....