OK, here's the latest update. We reinstalled SW in our machines. I followed instructions as per your valuable advise

.. I had to hack my computer to get into the registry, but I managed to get all references to SW and Edrawings after uninstalling them with the windows control panel.
The good news is that the programs are running much better and faster now.
I checked my machine and it has a Xeon 3.06 GHz and 1.5 GB of ram and has the Nvidia Quadro4 980 XGL withe the latest drivers. I'm running WinXP professional with whatever service pack was available the last time our IT guys were here...
My coleague's machine is older and has the 2.0 GHz, with 1.0 GB ram. Although he has the same video card I have, he is running with Win2K....
SW is still a little clunky compared with WF3.0 in some respects, but we are going to keep it. We might have some issues with our network policies and there might be processes running that we know nothing about and are using resources, but we can't do much about that now
Thanks to everyone for your help and your patience. I'm sure you'll hear from me again as I will undoubtedly need more help in the future
Thanks again