Windows Explorer is very slow to load and often hangs

When I right click on Start and select Explorer it launches the
Windows Explorer screen and only draws the right side of the Windows
Explorer view. It takes 37 seconds to load on a dual core AMD 3800
Dell with Windows Ultimate. Not much software on this box yet. Pretty
basic setup on my pc.

I have tried different DNS settings to see if Windows Explorer is
having trouble browsing to the mapped drives on my server which is
local. No good.

Any thoughts?

Is it a new PC, or an upgrade from XP/MCE ? If new - did you do a
"De-Dell-ify" (Remove extra Apps, cleanup startups). Something is not
right for an Explorer view to take that long to initialize. You might want
to investigate the context menu extensions with Shell Extensions Viewer.
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html