I take that back... LR 5.5 seemed to be running like it used to, but now it's running slow and pokey again. I rebooted, with no improvement. It's particularly noticeable when I crop. When I commit the crop, instead of instantly applying it and displaying the result, it seems to do it in two phases: First, the crop to size and then it moves the image within the crop size to correspond to what I applied. Weird.
But something must have changed, since it didn't behave this way before I installed LR 5.6. I could be due to something else going on in my machine, but I haven't been to find any likely candidates so far