Thanks, I found why those placeholders were showing. That was in Chrome and I had uBlock extension enabled. It did it for some reason. Regarding slowness its better now. But during weekend the dashboard was not even loading. It was just header and left pane and nothing bar that. I think I get it quite often.
There have been reports of folks just seeing the header and left hand panes before. Cause has generally been programs like Ghostery and similar programs blocking the download. If you're running any privacy type programs you may want to check the settings there and ensure Connect is white listed.