Comment 65 for bug 128803

I was seeing very slow Gnome load times as well.

After reading a "misconfigured loopback" comment above, I checked my network interface settings, and sure enough, I had configured a static IP address for my ethernet interface and the slow startup would happen only when I didn't have the ethernet cable plugged in.

I mostly use my wireless interface, so I set the ethernet interface back to "roaming" and the problem was solved for me.

So, I suspect the long load times are due to a network-manager timeout or something like that.