"It is slower to boot"
She's right. You can strip down the boot sequence as much as possible which will help. Microsoft accepted the criticism of their slow boot procedure and they did something about it. Of course, it mattered more when Windows was so unreliable it needed to be rebooted 3 times a day. :o)
"It does not start up applications as quickly as W2K" (OpenOffice definitely loads more slowly than Office2000)
Can't argue with that. Once Windows gets itself going (i.e. everything is cached which needs to be) it'll start Word or Excel just about instantly - certainly quicker than it's possible to time. OO is an embarassment in this respect, as is KDE to a lesser extent.
"Repaints take longer" (When shifting windows around)
Also true. X's network connection, albeit an internal one, slows it down when a large amount of data needs to be sent to the screen. There's not much you can do about it.
Mind you, she has an MSEE and is definitely not a Microsoft drone having studied UNIX in college. However, she is concerned that her organisation will have trouble adapting to a ""less responsive" OS on the older machines that are now running Windows 97 and 2000.
Does anyone have a different experience?
It's hard to argue with. Linux on the desktop is still heavily compromised, and your wife has just pointed out the things which are obvious as first glance. Wait until she gets going and notices the different looking applications (KDE vs GNOME vs OO, etc.), lack of sensible drag and drop behaviour across applications, crappy font handling (especially WRT screen vs printed output), and so on. Linux on the desktop is just about ready for engineers who know what they're doing, or people who have a limited set of requirements needed to fulfill a predictable set of tasks. It sounds to me like your wife is a bit too clued up. :o) She knows what she wants and needs, and is already asking all the right (wrong?) questions. If she's prepared to live with the compromises of Linux on the desktop in order to reap the benefits, fine. If she's got "concerns" at this early stage perhaps it's not the answer. Enthusiastic as I am personally, I still wouldn't push any Windows users I know towards Linux on the desktop. It's got a lot of maturing to do first. -- "...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE ...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003