I've been eating myself of agony. Photoshop was really pissing me off.
I run a 4gb memory, dual core pc with Windows Vista 64 and my laptop was opening files faster than my pc (note: My laptop is a 2gb CELERON, Windows XP).

When I opened a file it took forever for the image to show up in my screen. It even caused Windows to mark it as non-responsive. Is this why I bought a new PC?
I started searching for memory options, virtual memory, scrape-disks, graphic memory and I couldn't figure it out. Right when I started ripping my hair out the answer was right here, on this website.

I had a network-printer installed, and apparently Photoshop is looking for that printer every time you open, place, import or drag in an image. I set my default printer to the Adobe PDF "printer", and Photoshop was never this quick!

Time for a lemon-squeeze.

mine has to find one of 5 large presses at work! Think a normal inkjet is bad

As long as they're not network- or offline printers it's fine.. as soon as Photoshop has to start searching in a network, it's tragedy..

Yeah it's aggravating when apps do stupid things like that. I've known this technique for a really long time and always set PSD converter to default as it is software and doesn't have to use a cable to find it, and therefore I load faster.