Incredibly slow import into Lightroom Classic from hard drive and/or external drive

[Markfactor]

I have both a PC and Mac.  When I'm on the PC, Lightroom takes an eternity to import images into the catalog.  I'm leaving the master files where they are, not moving or copying them, but still Lightroom takes hours to import even a hundred images or so.  If I have a large import, it can take days.  This extremely slow import process happens when I import images from my local drive, or my external NAS drive - they are both incredibly slow.  What the heck is going on?  This never used to happen on the PC, and does not happen on the Mac either.

[dj_paige]

DELETED