Over the last few weeks, I have found that there has been some start performance issues when the machine does not have internet access (e.g. a virtual machine configured to have "local" network settings).  This causes a number of components to startup slowly.

1) K2 Server and K2 setup

Gert Nortje wrote this original post which highlighted this issue with slow K2 server and K2 setup startups.

"I’ve recently had this issue at a few customers where the K2Setup and K2HostServer takes over a minute to start up. This was also not isolated to K2, but also affected any IIS Web applications such as MOSS and Workspace and every time the Application Pools recycles it takes over a minute to start it up again.  This, as you can imagine causes havoc with MOSS integration and .Net applications performance across the board. This morning I was at last able to get to the root cause of this, which is Digital Signatures.  When a code signed application starts up it tries to verify the signature and with machines not connected to the internet it eventually times out on the connection and continues.  This was apparently resolved in the latest .Net 2.0 and 3.5 service packs, but in all of the cases that I hit this issue the service packs did not resolve it. Thanks to an MSDN blog I got the resolution for this if you hit it even after updating your framework. All you need to do is modify the “Machine.Config” on the relevant servers as per the following:

 <configuration>

....
    <runtime>
        <generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false"/>
    </runtime>

....
 </configuration>"

2) K2 Designers

Now I have also discovered that the Visual Studio designers also startup slowly if there is no internet connection.  This is caused by the "Check for publisher's certificate revocation" setting in your IE options.  Uncheck this setting and you should see the designer startup pretty quickly.

So if you are facing any of the above issues, I would suggest you give these settings a try to boost performance for the above mentioned components.  Cheers.