The core of this issue was just a bad disk drive I believe.  I ran some benchmark tests on the system and the drive was only writing at approx.  .30 mb/sec...yes, that's right, less than a mb...I went and bought a new hardrive and all is good.  I guess the performance relative to the win7 upgrade was just a coincedence...
I recently upgraded my e520 from vista 32 bit to win 7 32 bit.  It appears that the disk light is constantly on and when you check performance monitor, the disk is running at 100% for several minutes at a time.  This translates into apps opening very slowly, copying files is slow, etc.. I'm pretty sure it's related to the SATA controller and it's drivers.  I have downloaded and installed the latest for this chipset as well as downloaded the vista drivers...to no avail, neither seems to help.  Any suggestions ?
Dell E520 disk drive running slow after Windows 7 upgrade