There are a couple other candidate explanations for that:
Scott Malraw:
Win 2K on some very fast machines
But then they ought to have been able to handle this at least *somewhat* snappily, if it's done in these, as you say, very fast CPUs.
the context menus were excrutiatingly slow.
Step 1: If they are on, turn off all the cutesy "menu effects", fading etc, in your Desktop Properties (I think it was; or TweakUI?) -- maybe you're *asking* it to draw them slowly.
Step two: If these context menus were in Explorer (the file manager, not IE), then unmap all unreachable or slow network and removable drives -- maybe it's the code *behind* the menus that's slow, not the menus themselves.
Just stumbled across the second of these yesterday, on /. IIRC. And the first one recently, installing / configuring W2K... HTH!
Hmm... "excruciatingly", no?