So suddenly Premier CS5.5 is taking like a half hour to load a wedding project where normally it loads all it's media in under a minute (all my projects are roughly the same size with the same number of clips)

I'm just loading a much smaller project with only 70 very short assets and it's taken over 2 minutes just to load in 3 clips!

My media is stored on several drives so it seems not to relate to one specific drive

Please help???

Might be disc related? You could test by importing from one disc only and then move to the second this and so on to see if there is a disc that is causing the problem.

Yes it seems likely a hard disk about to fail - All my conformed audio files were on this disk - when I deleted them and forced a re-conform (a different disk this time) all seems ok :)