Hi,
I'm sorry for delay in answer. No, I have not any connected drives or network drives. I will not call it as Alfred hanging. In my opinion Alfred is working and is responsible when trying to display System preferences but it taking so long. I need agree it is inconsistent. It always take long at first attempt but second and all other are typically much faster but not always, mostly third one is as fast as form Apple menu.
Can I make other test for help?
In midtime I created new account, disable all started at login software (Dropbox, Cafeine, TextExpander and other) and nothing changed, problem still occur.
It is definitely something wrong with Alfred 2.