I too experienced the seemingly endless database updating process upon first running 2.1.8.1057 (free), even after a complete uninstall and reinstall. Almost 5 minutes on a very clean Win7 machine with an i7 chip and 8GB of RAM. But what I am now seeing is, I think, worth mentioning. Subsequent database updates are also very slow. Not truly glacial - as in "Geez, is the program hung?" - but far, far slower than was the case in prior versions. It's routinely taking about 30 seconds just to check for updates, a process that used to happen within about 3 seconds. The download and install doesn't seem to be any faster now (I'm on a rock-solid 66mbps connection). I notice in the release notes that one of the improvements is that the free version can now receive incremental updates. It would appear that this is not an "improvement" at all - receiving full database downloads was much faster. Someone might want to revisit this decision.