My 5 year old Dell Dim 2400 (XP Home) has done it for a year or two, and now, my 2 1/2 year old HP dv9000 laptop (Ubuntu) is doing it - slow pop-ups for menu items - such as history menu, or rt click menu...

Is this a function of hardware? Or software? Software problem doesn't seem likely, since Linux doesn't get bloated like Windows does...

Anybody?

You don't say what GUI you're running. From that comment, I take it that it isn't KDE4.

Just like Windows, there are a lot of 'desktop effects' available these days. You might try turning them off. If you're running an eye-candy-less wm and they're slow, then you do have some kind of a problem, though I'm not sure what it would be. Does this happen all the time or just under heavy load? Is the rest of the UI and/or system responsive? Maybe a compositing issue if you're using that sort of thing. Are you using generic or specific drivers for your video card? If you create a test account or temporarily move out your dotfiles so as to start with a clean config, does it still happen? Etc.

I doubt I can help directly, but maybe checking on these things will help spark something for you to solve it yourself.

Anyway, as far as hardware or software, it could be an underpowered or misconfigured machine or it could be a huge history database on "history menus" or visual eyecandy - either one.

I'm doing Gnome.

Desktop effects setting (whatever it is set at) is as it always has been (unchanged).

For a while, I did have a second browser window loading first, which made me think your 'heavy load' comment was the solution. Nope...

Video card driver is proprietary NVIDIA card driver - also unchanged since day one.

If you create a test account or temporarily move out your dotfiles so as to start with a clean config, does it still happen? Etc.
???

'History' database? How do I wipe that?

This morning, the screen dimmed at the 'History' drop-down request (not responding). Never done THAT before...

'History' library has 18,976 items.

This MUST be the problem???

Yep, that seems possible. (18,976 is a huge history list, yet it's not a huge database in the abstract.) As far as how to clear it, I don't know, as I don't use gnome but there should be a menu item in the settings menu or a setting in the gconf thing or you can just find where it's kept (possibly an sqlite db or something) and delete it (though be careful there and keep backups). While you're at it, see if there's a setting to limit it to a small number (or short time period) of items. If not, or if it doesn't work, I'd report it as a bug.

-- I see from another post that you seem to be talking about your web browser's history. I don't see that having anything to do with anything. I thought your were talking about the 'recently used' desktop history junk.