It's a VM, Win 3.11 was designed well before VMs were a thing. I'd be happy that I got it to boot!

I think it still searches for NT domains or something.

Yes, this happens on real hardware as well. I would also like an answer to this question.

I wonder if it's a hard coded delay with a busy wait state, in addition to whatever it's doing to setup the network. It can be sped up by fast forwarding in DOSBox-X but CPU speed alone hits a wall.

I think that this mystery could be solved by examining whatever is going on from a debugger.

I've got a 30 year dim memory of messing around with the delays, but I do not recall whether it was on WFWG or Win95... anyway, seemed to take forever to determine there was no media plugged into NIC, or to determine there was nothing it could log into on the network, but, plug it into a hub with nothing on it, satisfying media detect, but giving it nothing to try to connect to, it sped up. Was also quicker when it had TCP/IP only enabled and a dedicated gateway like one other machine on a twisted cable, or a cable modem with nothing else to do but respond to DHCP.

I have this problem in Windows 9x when there is no network cable attached. It seems to hang trying to resolve DHCP before it times out. In this case on Windows 3.11, I have no TCP/IP protocol installed.

It's probably looking for the WINS and NETBIOS master browser instead.

Disable the 'client for windows networks', and use a hard-set IP address.

Should proceed quickly. (You just wont be able to use fileshares)

Yeah that might have been a factor when I found it faster on an internet router that blocked those protocols.