So, I was doing a cut-n-paste maybe 50 cells and it was taking forever. I did this multiple times in all sorts of documents and it always took forever. Though I am not certain what started the behavior, Googling it was proving less than useful until Chief93 over at superuser.com led me to the solution. It was the dang default printer. Somehow it got set to a printer that I no longer have setup on the system. My goodness, how aggravating! I reset the default to the current printer and, viola, cut-n-paste is working as expected again. Thanks Chief93, where ever you are…

Reference: https://superuser.com/questions/397032/excel-freezes-when-copying-cutting-to-paste-elsewhere