9 Seconds to add a new record?

I have a fairly complex solution running over here and I recently converted it to 9 from 8.5. I began taking advantage of 9's ability to utilize external ODBC sources for several fields in the table. I have a pretty simple script that creates a new record and populates it with data.

What I noticed is that when the script gets to the "New Record" step, I get a spinning beach ball for 9 seconds or so. During this pause, the CPU load spikes for almost the entire time on the host machine (little or no disk activity). The ODBC data lookups are really fast so I don't think that's it unless something is going on in the background that I don't understand.

At first I suspected unstored calculations so I went through and changed a bunch to stored (that I thought would not be affected by that). It had almost no affect. I'm happy to give more specific information about my solution, but are there any gotchas right off the bat or things I should be looking for to see why this is happening?

Incidentally, I can reproduce this same pause by hitting new record from the layout itself so it isn't the script.