Audacity no longer runs in XP

I've just noticed recently that when I execute Audacity it stucks at the initialization phase with the hour-glass icon showing forever. I have to kill it with the Task Manager to get rid off it. I don't know when exactly this started happening because I have not used it for a while and in the meantime I updated XP with all the recent SPs. Using the latest version of Audacity results in the same thing.
Anybody else experiencing this, too?
Rudy