I thought I would add my findings. Hopefully they help someone else.
Today, I temporarily disabled a program that IT has on my workstation called ViewFinity Agent. What an amazing difference it made. If you have this on your computer, test WAB with the agent process stopped (I had to kill it 3 times before it went away).
My colleagues and I have been struggling with slow WAB for months. When I double-click startup.bat, the script would take a long time to refresh the repository items. The browser also would never open automatically for me. Whenever I created a new app, I would get errors and timeouts. Now everything runs so incredibly fast, and the browser opens for me as expected. The entire WAB can be up and loaded from stopped within 10-15 seconds. Even running a basic command like "npm --version" would take at least a minute. Now it takes seconds.
Now I am working with IT to see if there is some way to allow node JS to run freely without this pesky agent in the way.
On an aside, another issue this agent seems to cause is slowness when extracting the WAB installer download. When the agent was running, it took me 10-15 minutes to extract everything. Today, without the agent, it took just a few minutes.
Hopefully this might help someone.
Lance