Octave runs more slowly after force quit - performance

Question

I am running Octave 6.2.0. I have had to force quit the software after it became unresponsive while I moved its window across monitors, and since then any code I run takes much longer than it used to.
I run the same script with profile on on the "newly" slow computer and another laptop. Dlmread and fprintf make up for over 99% of execution time for the script, so I just compared times for those two functions.
Test 1: Octave 6.2.0 (after crash) on Dell Precision 3640 (Core i7-10700 # 2.9 GHz, 64 GB RAM) with Windows 10 Pro, from SSD.
Test 2: Octave 6.2.0 (after crash) on Dell Precision 3640 (Core i7-10700 # 2.9 GHz, 64 GB RAM) with Windows 10 Pro, from HDD.
Test 3: Octave 5.2.0 (for comparison) on Dell Inspiron 5570 (Core i7-8550U # 1.8 GHz, 32 GB RAM) with Windows 10 Pro, from HDD.
+--------+------------------+------------------+-----------------------+
| | dlmread time (s) | fprintf time (s) | Total script time (s) |
+--------+------------------+------------------+-----------------------+
| Test 1 | 138 | 249 | 388 |
+--------+------------------+------------------+-----------------------+
| Test 2 | 138 | 278 | 417 |
+--------+------------------+------------------+-----------------------+
| Test 3 | 48 | 45 | 93 |
+--------+------------------+------------------+-----------------------+
I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, clearing cache and preferences, installing an older version of Octave, but nothing seems to solve the problem.
Any idea of what may have gone wrong and anything else I could do to troubleshoot?
A similar issue is described in this post, but no solution was posted in that case: Octave suddenly running scripts slowly after crash.