Sounds like something is eating your CPU or RAM up. Just as an example, for me, typing at the desktop screen instantly brings up matching contacts, whereas you report 5 seconds. Definitely less than a quarter of a second for me. I would try and see what your CPU usage is as you are doing these things. If you have the cpumem applet installed, take a look at what it's doing, otherwise use conky or just the top command from inside xterm, perhaps.