Oddly, the IP hosts/address change did the trick to me.
I'm on XP, and have had "127.0.0.1 localhost" in my hosts file forever.
Recently (maybe after some Windows updates, maybe after adding other application directories to my xampp htdocs, maybe after installing something else that conflicts with those ports?) pages - even simple HTML pages - started loading extremely slowly.
Merely commenting out the "127.0.0.1 localhost" line in my hosts file seems to have done the trick - now pages are loading consistently quickly.
