Close request taking a long time

Sometimes when I generate figures from the live editor it takes a very long time to close them. Frustratingly long...

For example, I have some code where I call imagesc twice to make two figures. Example code below --

figure(1); clf; 
imagesc(image1);

figure(2); clf;
imagesc(image2);

I turned the profiler on, ran that section of code, then closed the two figures, and loaded profile viewer. Here's the result:

As you should be able to see, the "closereq" function took 59 seconds. What??? What's going on, how do I speed this up?

My computer is working normally and I can run most code very fast and efficiently, it's specifically figure closing that takes a long time.

Thanks for any tips!

[John Mikhail]

Does this also happen for very simple figures? For example, if you just run

figure(1)
close all

does it also take a long time?

Also, try opening the closereq function and making sure it looks like this:

function closereq
%CLOSEREQ  Figure close request function.
%   CLOSEREQ deletes the current figure window.  By default, CLOSEREQ is
%   the CloseRequestFcn for new figures.

%   Copyright 1984-2012 The MathWorks, Inc.

%   Note that closereq now honors the user's ShowHiddenHandles setting
%   during figure deletion.  This means that deletion listeners and
%   DeleteFcns will now operate in an environment which is not guaranteed
%   to show hidden handles.
if isempty(gcbf)
    if length(dbstack) == 1
        warning(message('MATLAB:closereq:ObsoleteUsage'));
    end
    close('force');
else
    delete(gcbf);
end