Is this delay just the 'first' time you access a site, or with each page load?
[Edit: I should learn to read. Oh well, most likely it's this then:]If it's just the first hit to a site, then the slowness is likely due to a DNS issue. Either a really, really slow DNS service, OR you have a bad primary DNS server specified. (I which case it will wait for a few seconds, time out, and then fall over to your secondary DNS and get the answer). After obtaining the IP, your computer will cache it locally for a while -- so it it is DNS related, subsequent pages should load fairly quickly until your DNS cache expires again.
If you have hardcoded DNS servers in your network settings, try swapping the secondary DNS server IP with the primary DNS server IP. If the primary is timing out on you, going to the secondary first may speed up your connection tremendously. If you don't have them entered but get them automagically assigned by your ISP, you can try to enter them manually (using the secondary as a primary, and vice versa) and see if it makes the problem go away.
If you don't know what your DNS servers are, you can do the following: Open a command prompt, and type:
ipconfig /allNear the bottom of the output your currently assigned DNS servers will be listed.
Also: Do a check for spyware, with multiple trusted spyware cleaners. (if you don't know for sure, don't believe a word on any site claiming to offer free spyware cleaners! Many of them are fakes and will make things worse. Recommended:
http://www.safer-networking.org (Spybot Search & Destroy)
http://www.lavasoftusa.com (Ad-Aware)
http://www.microsoft.com (Microsoft anti-spyware Beta)
http://housecall.antivirus.com (Trend Micro on-line anti-virus & anti-spyware scanner & cleaner)
Many spyweare programs will proxy your internet communications through themselves, harvesting 'interesting' information, inserting other junk, or redirecting your traffic to who-knows-where. Some of them will replace your working ISP's DNS servers with their own extra craptacular ones to be able to control more aspects of where you go and what you see. If you aren't already on top of it, it's pretty much a given that you'll have several pieces of spyware on your PC. Very few PC's don't, these days.
[The following probably don't apply to you since I missed the statement that subsequent loads are fast. But I'll leave them here anyway just in case, since I'd already typed them up anyway.]If all loads are slow, then it's probably not (just) a DNS problem.
possible causes:
1) high packet loss. To check, type the following at a command prompt:
ping <someserver.com> -t and let it go for a while. CTRL-BREAK to stop. Ideally you see no packetloss, but 1-2% would still be 'normal'. More than that, and you really should give your ISP a call. Packetloss results in your computer waiting for data, having to resubmit packet requests, and waiting to hear back on those too
something else to check: If you start a large download, will the transfer speed be 'good' after it finally starts? Are you getting a decent number of KB/sec in relation to what your internet connection speed should be, or do you see only a fraction of the expected speed there?
2) you may have a bad/old proxy server specified in your browser settings. Possibly a left-over setting from a former ISP, re-routing your traffic halfway over the internet and back before you finally get to see it
3) If you're on dialup and use one of those 'internet accelerators', you may have extra delays if your ISP's 'acceleration' proxy/compression server is overloaded
4) If broadband: You may have a poor network cable going to your modem
5) If broadband: You may have ran some kind of 'internet optimizer' program that messed with your MTU size, making your modem or ISP routers discard some of your TCP/IP packets if they are too big to pass along
6) You may have a program like Norton Internet Security or other marginal anti-virus program trying to scan all your internet traffic in real time, and failing miserably. If you run such programs, you may try to temporarily disable them and see if the problem goes away. Of course it's not recommended to run without an antivirus program, but at least it can prove that whatever product you current run may not be up to the job, after which you can look at possible replacements.
7) You may have a bandwidth hogging application running in the background, such as a peer-to-peer program. If your outgoing bandwidth is close to being saturated (not too hard to do on most asymetrical lines where you have more download than upload bandwidth), it can severely affect the speed of incoming transfers as well