Given that I have a fast internet connection, why does it take time to tell me I have the last version (or not) of Chrome when I click on about Chrome?

Hehe it has 'nothing' to do with your internet speed, its only a few bytes that's transfered.. The check isn't in Chromium as I run, so only a guess, but I'll asume they generate a checksum, and this is compared with latest at Google.. So the hang is probatly at google's servers answer back..

This can again be due to slow servers, or bad latency to your isp, or a slow dns ..
you could try a traceroute and check if everything looks fine if you really cares that much ...

Thanks Benni,
you do not have "about Chromium" in Chromium?

close the chrome. look @ taskmanager and close all running chome exist. then run chrome again to update (via about)

This is not really important, I was curious why such a simple thing takes time but only seconds really !!! So nothing to worry about.