Booting takes a good 15 minutes and launching form the desktop...even login screen...pauses a good minute before responding. This started about a week ago.
Boot progresses well until "Starting xintd" completes.
Then "Starting sendmail" takes about 10 minutes and everything slows down from there. Don't know if this is the culprit but sure looks suspicious. When launching a program from the desktop, No cpu or hd activity then, all the sudden, Pow! Hard drive blinks and application pops up. Any ideas?

Welcome to LQ

What distribution ?
Seems to me there is a problem with DNS
What is the content of
It should look like
what is the content of

For the rest I cannot say much based on that (but you should tell what OS/distribution you are using, may help others to answer), but the sendmail part is pretty familiar. To me it sounds like you aren't too familiar with sendmail, so am I right if I guess you don't need it (it's a system for delivering mail, which you don't need if you use email services maintained by somebody other than you yourself)? If so, disable it -- it's there for nothing if you don't use it, and if you have not set it up well, it may considerably slow down your boot process. Either use a graphical tool to disable the service if your system has one, or edit the init scripts to disable it.

Bingo!!!!!! It was the /etc/hosts. Had just the IP of the local ethernet. Thanks a million!!