1 - any application for which I have a shortcut for
2 - everything is local, nothing is mapped or referencing a network resource
3 - Nothing is on my desktop - well - maybe that's because of Fences. But launching from the Start menu is instant. Now this is interesting, I've never disabled Fences before. Initial panic as everything suddenly landed on my desktop - maybe that's normal. Anyway, I located Word on the desktop and it launched in 1/2 second. Thankfully when I re-enabled Fences everything came back. BUT - and I suspect this is only temporary - now launching Word from Fences works in 1/2 second too. I'll try again each day to see if the delay returns - and then I'll toggle Fences off/on to see if that fixes it. I'm guessing it will - because - recall above when I tried out that other Windows setting and then put everything back to the original setting the problem went away too --- until today.