I am using v5.2 build 5223 - I don't know what happened but now single-stepping takes about 4 seconds to go from one line of code to the next. What has happened to make this so slow? It did not used to be like else or else I would have pulled my hair out long before today.

Thank you.

It may happen if you are debugging over slow network and have too many data in current scope (check globals and locals), or if you have too many entries in the Watch window.

I disabled my Globals and Locals to see what difference that would make. Now I can't get them back. What do I do? Thank you.

did you close them or disable?
If you closed, just start debug session and open via View->Debug windows->Locals/Globals.
If you disable, start debug session, right click on them and make enabled in the popup menu.

How do I get rid of a local or global variable that is in the Locals or Globals window? I can disable, but not delete.

probably not what you need but unset($variablename) will drop the varable.

I had this exact same problem. Turns out it was caused by huge arrays, as suggested by dmitri. Seems that if you are using tons of memory in your PHP script debugging can get really slow, so don't go overboard.