Mac OS finder/account slowness

I've noticed that it takes finder a good 15 seconds to startup sometimes.  None of the forums I visited had any good answers, most dealt with generic account slowness and most recommended to just create a new account.  I decided to run top and see what is running and process flags when I noticed at the top of the list mount and mount_nfs sleeping.

PID   COMMAND      %CPU TIME     #TH  #WQ  #POR #MRE RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  ...

2429  mount_nfs    0.0  00:00.00 1    0    15   28   112K   288K   428K   17M    586M   2385 2428 sleeping ...

2428  mount        0.0  00:00.00 1    0    14   26   104K   284K   404K   9496K  578M   2385 2385 sleeping 

(output  discarded for brevity)

180   Finder       0.0  01:35.63 4    1    213  522  18M    51M    62M    37M    908M   180  174  sleeping 

I booted up my NFS server (which for my own reasons I do not keep constantly powered on) and tried launching finder again and this time, the window popped up with no delay. 

Shut off the NFS server, closed and reopened finder just to make sure that this delay is repeatable and reproducible.  Indeed it is and every time I open a finder window Mac OS (not sure which one of the internals) will attempt to mount_nfs.

Added the following to my NFS mount options
-dumbtimer -timeo=3

Closed the finder window clicked on the finder icon again, this time the delay was much shorter.  Hope this helps someone.

P.S. Having solved this problem does not make me a mac convert.  Figuring out why it takes finder so long to list a directory when ls only takes a split second might get me half way there.


P.S.S. Also deleting related items from /Users/$USER/Library/Preferences


Finder:
com.apple.finder.plist

Digital Photo Professional:

com.canon.Digital Photo Professional.LSSharedFileList.plist

com.canon.Digital Photo Professional.plist

helped, and now they work well even without NFS.  So the forums were right about that, just pointed to a different place when they mentioned preference cache.  So in my case I found the root cause, but resolved it the same way everyone else did.