Jim,
I don't know why a context menu inside PM would be slow, other than the Info text needs to be created (for the first item in the context menu, it has to get metadata from the file if it isn't already in memory.)
As for Ingest startup time, Ingest gets info on all mounted drives. If one of them is slow then Ingest will take time to appear. If you know you never want to ingest from a particular drive, you can put a folder on the root of the drive and name it "PMIngestIgnore" and PM will ignore that drive when it scans drives.
HTH,
-Kirk