PerformanceCounter Constructor Horribly Slow

I'm doing some work on FlexWiki, and I'm finding that this call:

PerformanceCounter answer = new PerformanceCounter(s_PerformanceCounterCategoryName, name, false);

is sometimes taking a really, really long time to come back. Like several minutes. I started tracking it down via Reflector and native debugging, and it looks as though PerformanceCounter internally spins in this loop, inside a BCL-internal class called SharedPerformanceCounter:

int num1 = SharedPerformanceCounter.MaxSpinCount;
while (spinLockPointer[0] != 0)
{
  Thread.Sleep(1);
  num1--;
  if (num1 == 0)
  {
    spinLockPointer[0] = 0;
  }
}

Aside from the fact that this looks thread-unsafe to me, I'm not entirely sure what it's waiting for at this point. But given that MaxSpinCount is 10000, on my machine that seems to work out to around four minutes, so that explains where the delay is coming from. But what I don't understand is under what conditions this occurs - the SharedPerformanceCounter code is a bit hard to wade through, and I haven't made much headway with it.

In an RTFM moment, Shawn Van Ness suggested I look over at the Product Feedback Center to see if there were any similar bugs. I'd Googled, but hadn't landed there, although I should have thought of it. At any rate, when I did look I found this rather disturbing bug. Why disturbing? Because it implies that slowness in PerformanceCounter is to be expected. Although one could also read the bug report to merely indicate that the service hanging because of a long-running operation is the expected behavior. Either way, not very helpful.

Anyway, I haven't been able to figure anything out on this, so I'm blogging it. Ideally someone will know what I'm doing wrong. As a second best, perhaps the entry will serve as a sanity check for others with the same problem. Has anyone seen this constructor take a really, really long time to come back before?