OK, disclaimer: I am completely new to DW, and using version 8, just learning,
new to this forum, and clueless why simply creating a site locally and then
adding just one page (from the starter-page, unchanged) is an issue. When I
browse the starter page (IE 7) or save it and browse to view it...it is very
slow. Slow, like...hover a mouse over a link and wait 10 seconds for the hover
to highlight...that kind of slow. I did try a different starter page and it
worked ok...but the spa page has the style I am looking for to use in a site I
need to prototype. ...and I can't just ignore IE as a browsing platform if
that's the issue.

Must be something extremely obvious I missed. Ignorance is not bliss.

It's hard to say without being able to review your code. Can you provide the URL?

Unfortunately, I can?t give you a good URL right now, my test server is going
to be unavailable today. I am hoping that my performance issue is extremely
basic (ignorant user error on my part), because it happens on my local machine
as well, with nothing new added ?by me? to the template. Here?s exactly what I
did?started DW8, created a local site, selected the spa ? home page, created it
as home.htm. The only default I changed was when I placed all the assets into
a subfolder called ?assets?, where they were found ok (images and CSS are shown
in design mode and in browser preview). Then I just previewed it in the
browser (from the File option within DW8).

Apparently the problem is my particular IE browser (settings). The website
performs well with IE on several other machines and works fine with Safari on
my desktop. I do not know what IE setting is causing it, this is not a
Dreamweaver issue.

...Thank you for your response to my question.