Building of the Apple Menu Submenus
When using System 7.5 and the Apple Menu Options control panel with Submenus turned on, there can be a noticeable delay as the Finder launches. What is happening is the building of the Apple menu hierarchical pop up menus. Depending on how many folders are present under the Apple menu, the delay before the Finder is ready for operation may be very noticeable. Including an alias to the hard drive itself, which allows for hierarchical navigation of the disk file system, causes the longest delay for the Finder to fully examine the disk's folder organization down to five levels.
Try turning off the Submenu option in the Apple Menu Options control panel to see if this is what is causing the delay. Removal of an alias to a hard drive is another option to try. As another alternative, you can try the many commercial utilities such as Now Menus, HAM, and MenuExtend, or shareware products like BeHierarchic, MenuChoice, and so on that support hierarchical Apple menus. These third party products offer different features from Apple Menu Options and have different approaches when they build, update, and cache the pop up menus.
Personal File Sharing
Check to see if you are running Personal File Sharing. Personal File Sharing initialization takes place in parallel with the initial availability of the Finder, but can be noticed by the sound of disk activity after the Finder is ready to use. Initialization of File Sharing can depend on the number of items shared and the complexity of access privileges.
Occasionally, the integrity of the AppleShare PDS file can become corrupted, causing long initialization and a lot of disk activity. Deletion of the AppleShare PDS file and recreation of the access privileges restores the integrity of the file and shortens File Sharing startup time.
As the file is invisible, you must delete it with ResEdit or a third-party utility that can view invisible files. Use the utility to make the PDS file visible on the desktop so that it can be trashed from the Finder.
Warning: The instructions in this article refer to using ResEdit. Apple Computer, Inc., is not liable for any damage done to your software through the use of ResEdit to alter software.