OK I think I've sorted it.  After more googling using some of the info given 
here I tracked down a copy of Filemon to see what explorer was doing.  It 
turns out that every time I tried to navigate or open a right click menu 
explorer was looking for "shell32.dll" in C:\Windows and failing to find it 
(it is is the system32 folder), and then it was looking for it in the root 
of G:\ (my personal network share).  I have no clue why it was doing this, 
but it was doing it mulitple times whenever I tried to do anything in an 
explorer window.  Obviously explorer only works in a single thread, so the 
call to open a non-existant network file was hanging the entire process for 
10 seconds or so.

I simply copied shell32.dll from C:\Windows\System32 into C:\Windows and now 
everything is zipping along like a new machine - even with the inaccessible 
network shares and printers!

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