Dear God, why is the Management Console so slow?

I’ve got an Exchange 2010 lab. (Obviously i’ve got an Exchange 2007 lab, and a 2003 lab as well. i also have an exchange 2000 lab and a 5.5 lab, but last year i got rid of my 5.0 lab. i felt a sense of accomplishment.)
My Exchange 2010 lab is on VMWare, and it’s isolated from the internet because we don’t have that many IPv4 addresses to go around. if only someone would come up with a new form of IP addressing. When i open the console or the shell it is so sloooow. so very, very slow.
Last week, for a different problem, i had cause to look at this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2469863
which says that a failure to contact crl.microsoft.com will cause Exchange Search to timeout and silently fail. it’s not just Search, though that tries to contact that URL. lots of .NET stuff sends windows there to validate origin; including, it appears, the Management Console.
so i added 127.0.0.1 crl.microsoft.com to my hosts file ,and bingo! no more hanging around for five minutes waiting fro the Console to start.