Could you please paste the output of these commands:

grep -i uri ~/.recently-used | wc -l
grep -i href ~/.recently-used.xbel | wc -l
ls ~/.thumbnails/large | wc -l
ls ~/.thumbnails/normal | wc -l

Simon, also, are you running 32 or 64bit?

This could be related to Bug #375701

grep -i uri ~/.recently-used | wc -l
grep: /home/linux/.recently-used: No such file or directory
0

grep -i href ~/.recently-used.xbel | wc -l
2

ls ~/.thumbnails/large | wc -l
ls: cannot access /home/linux/.thumbnails/large: No such file or directory
0

ls ~/.thumbnails/normal | wc -l
ls: cannot access /home/linux/.thumbnails/normal: No such file or directory
0

This is on 2 different 32-bit systems (desktop and notebook), i945 chipsets each, using the Live system (from USB; no such lags in general; e.g. alt-F2 comes up almost immediately)

Tried "zypper install esound" as root, but got
Installation of esound-0.2.38-54 failed:
(with --nodeps --force) Error: Subprocess failed. Error: RPM failed: error: failed to stat /home/linux/.gvfs: Permission denied
so I can't tell whether that would fix it.

Simon, to clarify, does this delay only happen with a live USB image?

I can't say for sure, since I have no other system besides Live USB to test this on.

(In case you think Live USB might be slow in general: I've been using several different Live distros running from USB (including Ubuntu), and no other distro takes about half a second before the start menu is opened... so it can't be USB live systems in general that cause this lag.)

I still think this is related to the esound bug. Please download the esound package manually and run;

rpm -Uhv --force    on the esound package.

Definitely esound. Installing it reduces the lag drastically.

Ok, thanks for testing. Marking as a dupe of the esound bug.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 375701 ***