Update

It took 3 hours to complete uninstall all Office related products from the secretary's PC and reinstall Office 2003 without Outlook and then Outlook 2007 from Comcast and get it installed. -- it took several reboots between each uninstall and reinstall    Machine booted fastest with no Office apps installed.

First launch was still 2-3 minutes for Outlook to open and sat at not responding.  I had to go into the control pane; then mail to delete the previous files/location by removing the profile.  Create a new profile.  Finally it did respond and I was able finish configuration but it took another 5-10 minutes.  Once that was done exited/closed and restarted and it came up quickly.

None of the above would have been requires except there was a bad install of Office XP/2002 and/or Office Publisher separately that was creating problems especially on a Windows VISTA PC.  The PC itself has 2GB RAM and a fair processor so this sloooooooooooooowness was software based.

I switched the DNS servers for the LAN connection to Google 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and that seemed to also help.

I still need to install the 8x8 plugin for Outlook and lastly configure the autologin script I found which will help get it opened faster as well.