I am having the same issue on my office PC, windows 7, textmode IDE 3.0.4, a hello world program taking 5 seconds for linking. The issue only appeared a few months ago, and I am fairly certain it is related to the virus scanner running in the background. I tried to exclude all relevant directories from the scan, but no avail, this is a realtime scanner which seems to hook into running processes, and I cannot stop it without admin rights.
The linking stage takes 5 seconds, then another 5 seconds before the compiled program starts running. Nevermind, the problem goes away when the IDE has run for 15 minutes or so in the background. Seems that by then the scanner has convinced itself there is no harm... therefore I try to keep the IDE running in the background all the time; whenever I terminate and restart it, the issue is back - for the next 15 minutes.
No such issues on my home PC.