I have a virtually identical setup; AMD K6-2 450, 192 MB RAM, IDE hard disks, /home via NFS over 10baseT network, KDE 2.1.1-3 from Debian/SID, on a (mostly) Debian testing machine, with kernel 2.4.3. I do have similar times in launching applications, though I haven't actually looked very hard to see whether if anything can be done to fix it. I have always assumed that either 1) the NFS mounted /home is a bad idea where speed is important, or 2) KDE is just slow at launching applications.
I recently added 128Mb RAM to this system, going from 64 to 192Mb. I thought it might speed things up, but I haven't really noticed any difference with KDE. Do you have similar delays logging into KDE as another user? I've meant to test that. If you creat a new user, and start times are much faster, I guess it would be a problem in the config files, as you mentioned. If the same delays are there, it is probably something to do with NFS. It could be both. Another thing to try to see if NFS is contributing to the problem is to log in as root, which of course will use the (presumably) local directory /root. If there are not similar delays as root, then NFS is the culprit. Solutions? If the delay is NFS related, would a 100baseT network make any difference? Any other suggestions? I never see much discussion about KDE's speed. I would not recommend it to anyone with much less than my machine. I tried running KDE 2.1.1 on a Pentium 133 laptop with 48MB ram, thinking that it might be slow but still useable. It works, but.... 2 Minutes to load the KDE desktop from KDM (with a local home directory); 50 seconds to load Konqueror... On the other hand, on my brother-in-law's Athlon 1.2G w. 256MB RAM, things start pretty much immediately.