Is your Microsoft office manager taking way too much time to load?

The reason behind it is that  the picture manager keeps track of the most recently used paths, and if any of these paths is no longer available, the software will stall for a long period.
The most possible scenario is that you have accessed a folder over the network, and you are no longer able to access that location.
The fix is rather simple.

On windows XP, go to c: -> documents and settings -> username (your login) -> local settings -> application data -> Microsoft -> OIS
Open the file ‘oiscatalog.cag’ with our favorite text editor (e.g. notepad) and delete any line pointing to a remote location.
You might as well delete that file, and it will be recreated upon starting the software again.

PS: if you’re on vista, the path to that file is C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OIS

thanks