It sounds as if you might have a malware problem (virus/trojan). Try SpyBot & Ad-Aware as BG suggested.
If that's not the issue, and it's just that there are some programs that are taking forever to load, you might want to check out Soluto... it will tell you how long a particular program is taking to load, and what most other users have done in that situation (it uses "crowd-sourcing" to maintain a database of what others have done). It's a very handy program.
You can google any of these programs for download, but Soluto (the least well known) is at:
Soluto ? Anti-Frustration Software