You might have a device driver or a service that is hanging in the background causing the delay, ZoneAlarm is known to do that when the application misbehaves due to your system configuration or the program itself becoming corrupted.

Open registry editor to see if you have the following keys/values if so then set their data to what I show which might also help:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
> AutoEndTasks = 1
> HungAppTimeout = 3000
> LowLevelHooksTimeout = 3000
> WaitToKillAppTimeout = 3000