Ahhhh! CR 8.5 is a VERY old version of Crystal - it's been out of support for around 15 years. The internal structure of .rpt files had some major changes with Crystal 9. It could be that the report is taking a while to load because of those differences. You might try saving the .rpt file from VS in order to upgrade it.
I also just had another thought - if you let the report load once, close it and then open it again or open another report, is the issue still there? If not, then the slowness you're seeing is due to the .Crystal NET assemblies loading the first time a report is loaded.
-Dell