Stats:

Solidworks 2010 SP4 (network license)

EPDM 2010 SP4  (3 archive servers w/ replication)

and the obligatory SQL server

Windows 7 64 Bit SP1

I am having troubles with performance intermittently. At various time during the day (and happening much more frequently lately) I get extremely slow performance while working in Solidworks with EPDM.  For example I do something simple like edit a sketch, exit a sketch or even something really stupid like just click on a drop down menu and solidworks will freeze for 15 - 20 minutes.  Sometimes it works very fast.  the same actions i mentioned above will take only a second or two to complete.

Each time solidworks freezes and I analyze the wait chain it indicated that solidworks is waiting to complete some network I/O

What I've tried:

Working on another computer

Uninstalling Antivirus

Turning off windows firewall

Borrowing a license and working offline.

No change in performance.

I ran a process monitor whilst working like this and even when just clicking on a dropdown menu like "insert"(before even selecting a command) and I watch EdmServer.exe constantly reading and writing to our server  \Pipe\Sql\Query as well as a ton of registry keys.  Why???

Has anyone ever experienced anything like this or perhaps have any insight into this problem?  At first I thought it might be a problem with the license manager but that doesn't seem to be the case.  But I'm not ruling anything out at this point.  I could really use some help and right now I am constrained on 2010 by our customer base.