Importing Astropy on my system takes anywhere between 3-5 minutes due to checking the wrong network location for its Home directory.

The OS is Windows 10 1809 (the vast majority of users here are not comfortable with Linux environments), so os.name = 'nt'

The code in config.paths._find_dir() relies on the contents of os.environs. It searches for 'MSYSTEM' (does not exist), then 'HOMESHARE', which does. It then attempts to find %HOMESHARE%\.astropy, which does not exist and never will. %HOMESHARE% = \\server_root\, and I obviously do not have write permissions to create \\server-root\.astropy. Python hangs for several minutes waiting to timeout as it attempts to access \\server-root\.astropy\

It should instead attempt to find %HOMESHARE%\%HOMEPATH%\.astropy = \\server-root\user-name\.astropy, which does exist - or at least, will have write permission available. This would be equivalent to how the next IF statement uses the environment variable HOMEPATH.