I think the issue here is not that Illustrator or Photoshop are looking for a network printer but rather, they (as well as other applications) are looking for the characteristics of whatever the current default printer. If that happens to be a WSD printer and if the underlying OS support for delivering such characteristics is fraught with delays as perhaps that protocol may be trying to interrogate the device directly (possibly waking it up from a sleep mode? 
), there is nothing much that you can do about it.
One alternative is to use a different printer using a different protocol as your default print device. (Yes, I know that is ugly!) You might also query your printer's manufacturer to see if they understand the latency problem with their device and/or whether Microsoft may have a fix for their enabling code.
- Dov