When browser tabs are opening uber slowly, they often have a graphic that shows a circle rotating counter clockwise that later switches to clockwise once the browser is closer to loading successfully.
Opening a new browser tab can be a full 75 MBs worth of RAM up front. 10 Tabs would consume 750 MBs worth of RAM. 40 Tabs would require 3GBs worth of RAM. Sometimes even more.
If he is trying to open up a browser with some hideous number of tabs at once, especially if it is a poor browser (Safari on Windows, for instance) he could be starting at counterclockwise animations for a LONG time.
That was my first thought when I read the post.
Reinstalling Windows to clean out a lot of crap in the OS could help, so could defragging, or increasing the page file size or all of the above.
Buying a new computer could help a lot too, if the OP has an old core.
- Edit -
Firefox has memory leak issues which means that sometimes memory used by the browser that is supposed to be given back to windows later actually never is freed up and given back to windows, which means Firefox gets slower and slower and slower without stopping until it is forced to give it up by, say, restarting the PC. This could have something to do with it if you use Firefox, but this tends to matter more the longer a computer has been on rather than right when it comes on.
Also, if you are just starting the computer and jumping right into the browser, Windows could still be loading parts of the subsystem or doing routine things like Anti Virus checks on the RAM or other such things. Stuff like the AMD Control Center can take some time to load once windows is started. If you try to load browsers too quickly after system start, it could still be loading these sorts of things and push the browser opening off until last.
Chrome is a fast browser that releases memory back to the OS the fastest out of all browsers, you might try using that instead if you can.
- End Edit -