When I start one of the applications mentioned in the title from the terminal, I get this:

Registered DEC:  true 
Error in contacting registry 
"org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" 
"Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken." 
Could not query active accessibility event listeners. 
Registered event listener change listener:  true 

Currently I am running 12.04 This problem started a couple of days ago, shortly after I've installed okular from within the software center.

by "slow" I mean it takes about 30 seconds. Other applications like chromium start instantly.