Thanks Peter. I don't notice any issues with the step/dir lints. As for the other possibility the hesitation is intermittent (doesn't happen every time I turn on/off flood) and more importantly, it sometimes happens when turning the flood off. And also, the situation that when cutting arcs also causes the hesitation so it isn't isolated to just turning flood on/off. In fact, once the program is running, flood is turned on at the start and off at the end so that probably wasn't the source that was causing my initial observation that led me to diagnose this.
Unfortunately, I don't have a scope.
cheers,
Michael