@IntuitBrooks 

I think your message below was addressed to me.

I am a single user on the Desktop.

My Company file is 22.1MB.  My Mac M1 has SSD of 1TB and I have 557GB available.  

I have no open windows or Reports or anything.  But ... I have been poking around and I find that my Company file is on my local (home) networked drive, where I store Backups, when i select Help and look at Product Information!

This could account for the slow response.  
However, here is where I am confused.  Shouldn't the default location be on my local disk at C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\Intuit\QuickBooks\Company Files. ???

At least, that's what I have always assumed.  My understanding was that Backups should point to a separate drive - in my case a remote network drive so that if my local file gets corrupted or crashes, I can restore easily.

When I look at MacHD, there is nothing in users\jagishahani\Public.  How would I go about doing this. 

The only thing I can do is select Backup and then choose Macintosh HD|users\jagishahani(my user name)\Public.  Do I save it there?  or create a path \PublicDocuments\Intuit\QuickBooks|Company Files?  And then how do I ensure that QB will look at this locally.

Actually, I am intrigued as to why QB did not set it up like this when i upgraded to QB Mac Plus 2022.