One of the biggest things we noticed with SQL Server 2005 was that the Management Studio took for ever and a day to start up. Well I finally ran across this blog which explained why. This really worked for me! It used to take 1 min to start up and now it takes 1 sec!

http://blogs.msdn.com/euanga/archive/2006/07/11/662053.aspx

This is not the answer to all occurrences of the issue but try the following;

* Shut down SSMS.
* Go into IE, select Tools|Internet Options|Advanced
* If “Check publisher’s certificate revocation” under the security node is checked, then uncheck it.

Now try SSMS again, was it faster? Either way re-check the setting to be safe.

Ok so here is what is happening. SSMS has a high percentage of managed code, all of this code is signed when we ship it. At start up (if this setting is checked) the .Net Runtime tries to contact crl.microsoft.com to ensure that the cert is valid(there were some fake certs issued in Microsoft’s name a while back so this is a very valid concern). If there is no internet connection or there is a problem contacting the certificate revocation list server then this will delay SSMS startup.