Opening a new instance of Internet Explorer or a new tab in Firefox
always takes about 3 to 5 seconds before it comes up.

Here's the background:

I use terminal services to telecommute to work. The speed is just fine
for most things. It's so good that I hardly even realize that I'm
using my work computer from home.

One of the issues with Win2k terminal services is that you can't open
a terminal service session into the primary session (or whatever you
call it when you just log onto the computer directly from the physical
machine). So, to get around this, when I'm at work I log into my
machine and then open a terminal services session to that same
machine. Then, when I go home, I just disconnect from it. That way,
when I go home I can reconnect to that same session from home and
work. This means I don't have to close any apps when I go home, etc.

However, when I'm working within a terminal services session (either
from work to work, or from home to work) it takes 3 to 5 seconds to
open a new instance of internet explorer. By that I mean that it takes
that long before the new explorer window becomes responsive at all
(despite the fact that I have the home page set to "about:blank"). In
Firefox I can open a tab quickly, but after I enter a url in the
address bar and hit enter, it takes 5 seconds before it actually opens
up the site.

If, while at work, I minimize the terminal services session and open
explorer and try to go to yahoo.com, it all happens near instantly.
So, the only thing common to the times that the problem occurs, is
that I am trying to access the network from within a terminal services
session.

A bit more detail:
When I open explorer it always takes about 3 seconds before becoming
responsive (when being opened inside terminal services). When I enter
a url to a new site, it delays for a while and then shows the page.
When clicking on links around a site, it always responds quickly.

And, for some reason, today it's even slower than normal. It seems to
take about 20 seconds to open a url to an external site, but I'm
working from home right now and can't verify if it happens outside
terminal services at work.

Perhaps this is a DNS issue? If it is, why does it only happen while
inside terminal services?