I upgraded our environment last night to general release of 10.7 and it has absolutely returned back to normal. Maps open within 3-5 seconds, sometimes instantly instead of spinning away for 30-60 seconds.
I haven't seen the maps perform like this since before October when I upgraded to 10.6.
However, I also made WAY too many changes to determine what the issue was.
We went from a tiny ALL-IN-ONE SQL/NPM/SAM running on hardware to 3 new VMs.
I separated NPM and SQL and added an additional polling engine and well as NTA 3.11 on the main polling engine and VMAN running on a 4th VM.
Either way. Definitely worth upgrading to 10.7! WOW!
Thanks for sorting this out Solarwinds.