Why are Vista launch shortcut keys so slow?

Count to yourself:

One Mississippi
Two Mississippi
Three Mississippi
Four Mississippi
Five Mississippi

That’s how long it takes for Vista to open a command prompt (cmd.exe) when linked to a shortcut key (ctrl-alt-C).  Trying it with other keystrokes doesn’t change the time it takes.  This is on a Thinkpad T60 with 3 gig of RAM and a dual core processor that is lightly loaded at the time of the tests.

When I tried this on a copy of Windows Server 2003 that is running under Virtual PC on my laptop it was instant.

Back in Vista, clicking on the Orb then the "Command Prompt" shortcut link is practically instant.  How far we’ve come that using a keyboard to launch a program is actually slower than using the mouse!