Slow browsing of the PAD

[JH]

We are on CEP 7.3 MR1 and have the following performance issue:
Adding/editing/browsing macros in the PAD- is extremely slow.
Similarly opening / creating A>C and C>A d-links is extremely slow (e.g. 2 mins to open an A>C dlink). The issue occurs on all CEP admin workstations and running Analsyt and contributor clients direc on the server. General system perfromance is pretty good - normal Contributor jobs run at a very acceptable speed, which is what i would expect as we are running a fairly well spec'd 4 proc job/web server.
I used to be a cognos consultant and have seen a very wide number of sites and the performance when browsing the PAD is very poor indeed - considering the PAD only has a small number of macros in it. I have already tried creating a new PAD and then benchmark the time to create macros and the same issue occured, so this is not PAD specific. Also - I have the PAD secured against a single admin user class (and I only have around 1000 userclasses in my name space) so i dont think this is userclass related but could be wrong. Any thoughts on why this kind of PAD access would be so slow? im a bit stumped.