LRC Open Recent takes a VERY long time

I don't think this is a bug, but it's definitely an annoyance. 

LRC 13.0.1, but this started before V13...  Windows 11 Pro, i9-12900, 64GB memory, EVERYTHING on SSDs.

Lightroom starts fine - it's not "fast", but it's not any worse than it's always been.

But SWITCHING catalogs takes much longer than in older versions.  Going into File>Open Recent to switch from the culling catalog (stuff captured while traveling that gets culled before importing) to the Images catalog, or going the other direction at best takes around 30 seconds if I go back and forth several times, to never in some cases.  Without going back and forth several times to test, I'd say it can easily take a minute or more to switch catalogs.  Sometimes, the "from" catalog goes away, and the "to" catalog just never starts.  The average is definitely slow enough to wonder if it's going to come up.

Shutting down and restarting is sort-of, marginally faster, but when I do that - exit from the current catalog, go down and click LRC to get to the "choose catalog" popup, I frequently get the hourglass for 10 or so seconds, then it goes away but NO catalog opens.  Usually after 2 or 3 times it opens the choose screen.

I don't know if it's got a huge amount of resources to release (or grab), or if the lock file doesn't want to go away, or what.  As I said earlier, EVERYTHING is on SSDs - catalogs, cache, temp stuff are all on NVME SSDs, and all the images are on a fast 8TB SATA SSD.

Is there ANYTHING in the preferences or catalog settings or some system setting(s), that can cause it to take so long to switch catalogs?