Hi Circular,
Apologies for not getting back sooner; work and other things stopped me from progressing any further until yesterday.
Yesterday morning I created a small app bundle of your speed test to take to where I purchased my 2 identical imac from, as I was noticing other strange behavior and slowness. On running app on their MAC's I was getting better performance than on my old PC; I have left one IMac with them for repair ( tried things like timemachine and Restore to factory and Safe mode still very slow) so they can repair and fix.
So my slowness is not with BGRABITMAP but both my Imac's

I have got an old Imac out of the attic 10.6.8 SL; and installed 1.4.4 and bgrabitmap and the speed is on a par with my windows PC. So for the time being I will test with this 12 year old MAC

Thanks for persevering.
Josh