https Causing hangup on Dashboard?

Hi all:

I’ve got a couple of WordPress sites starting up for work. They are government clients, so we have them on https. When logging in to the site, the Dashboard takes FOREVER to load. We’re talking… minutes at times. However, if I type in a direct url to, say, the posts page of the admin section, it loads instantaneously.

Is there something about the Dashboard that’s causing this? Is there something I can turn off to quicken this process? I’m going to have distributed clients logging in for a demo, so a hangup like this just isn’t a professional solution.

I’ve not sure of the inner workings of https, so it may be obvious. Either way, thanks!

adam