I wanted to share my own solution to this issue: Bridge Favorites.
I discovered that ANY Favorites set up in Bridge, causes Bridge to rescan all those locations at every startup. If you have "Computer" as a favorite, for example, Bridge will go through every drive located in your My Computer - USB direct-connect, flash, network mapped - in an attempt to rebuild its index. I discovered that this was my problem: the extreme delays come from Bridge's attempt to re-index every location saved as a Favorite.
What worked for me was to delete every location except those that were needed with special emphasis towards deleting direct-access drive shortcuts (unless I really needed them). I deleted Computer, I deleted My Documents, I deleted everything except the actual folders to specific photo storage locations and ONE drive-direct favorite - my SD card reader (drive G:). Then I went into the preferences and compacted the cache in order to delete all thumbnails that Bridge lost access to now that I deleted all those extraneous Favorite locations (also use this opportunity to check cache size and confirm that it is set as large/small as you need it to be to handle your image storage load).
Bingo! No more delays - in combination with using Bridge 32-bit and this process, both Bridge and Photoshop now run smooth and fast.
