Comment 63 for bug 12040

I am also able to confirm that on 10.04 desktop and netbook this problem is present. It's very noticeable on older 4600 and 5400rpm drives where you can wait up to and even over 35 seconds for it to appear.

A non-programmer solution to this problem would be to have the menu stored in a cache along with the icons, and this gets refreshed when a program is installed, as this would help prevent the random reads to the drive, most likely trying to fetch the icons. - This may not be correct, it just seems to be what is happening.