Is anybody else experiencing huge delys with the the .Clear method?
and more importantly, are there any magical tips for it?

Let's take an example: Range("Sheet2!C10:C40000").Clear

takes 1minute 54 seconds(yes, i timed it with a stopwatch). This is an
average of 3 trials, each of which took a similar amount of time.

True this is running on a laptop with a Centrino Duo (2x 1.06 GHz
processors) and with excel only ever using one of these, it doesn't
help.

The same code on a laptop running excel 2003 (single 1.3 GHz
processor) is almost instant, a few seconds at most.

I don't really expect anybody to come up with something to solve this,
but rather to tell me that there is a problem with excel?