Sorry what I meant was the Navigation Menus are slow!

If you mean the tabs on the menus  themselves as opposed to the flyout  menus
generated from the tabs. The one thing you can do is check which
SiteMapprovider entry in the Web.config the menu is ultimately tied to. They
fall into one of two basic classes, either regular SPSiteMapProvider or
PortalSiteMapProvider. The Portal version, which is only used by default in
publishing, caches the navigation information which can lead to faster loading.
Take a look at the following for more info.

blogs.msdn.com/.../increased-performance-for-moss-apps\
-using-the-portalsitemapprovider.aspx

I'm checking the web.config in our VirtualDirectories\sitename\*. We currently
have:

<siteMap defaultProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" enabled="true">

That specifies the default SiteMapprovider. You also need to look in the master
page you are using to see if the default has been overridden. You can do this
by defining a SiteMapDataSource which points to a specific SiteMapProvider and
then binding the Menu control to the data source. You can also just bind the
menu to a different datasource directly. Having the default set to
CurrentNavSiteMapProvider doesn't mean that's what is being used.

Got it.

<SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="TopNavigationDataSource">
<Template_Controls>
<asp:SiteMapDataSource
ShowStartingNode="False"
SiteMapProvider="SPNavigationProvider"
id="topSiteMap"
runat="server"
StartingNodeUrl="sid:1002" />
</Template_Controls>
</SharePoint:DelegateControl>

We're using (currently) SPNavigationProvider ...went back and checked and this
is the only provider referenced in our master page. To my knowledge it has not
been changed... you're saying we should give PortalSiteMapProvider a go?

I would use one of the SiteMapProviders based on the PortalSiteMapProvider class
because it includes caching of the navigation nodes where the
SPNavigationProvider doesn't. If you've got MOSS then take a look at one of the
master pages that are loaded when you turn on publishing. For example the
BlueGlassBand.master stored in the PublishingLayouts feature folder of the 12
hive.

Something else I found interesting was this:
blogs.technet.com/.../troubleshooting-spsit\
e-spweb-leaks-in-wss-v3-and-moss-2007.aspx

It explained quite a bit, and we're going to at least entertain what this guy
mentioned.... I'll let you know how it goes.

It also explains what's happening when we hit the front page of our site. I
found this out after running a utility (SPTraceView) ...which is an excellent
utility!

I seem to remember there is a delay setting for how long you have to hover over
the menu before it flys out. But the rendering is all done client side by java
code. Lag time  after they start to render would be different from one client to
another.