Electrum-NMC tries to connect before Tor has connected
Currently, Electrum-NMC is launched in parallel with Firefox, which causes Electrum-NMC to make some initial connection attempts before Tor has connected. Unfortunately, Electrum-NMC infers from this that the servers are unreachable, and it waits some time before trying again. This causes a noticeable delay before Namecoin resolution is available in Tor Browser.
We could improve the situation by having StemNS monitor Tor's connection status, and have StemNS launch Electrum-NMC once Tor has connected.
Example user report of this issue: https://old.reddit.com/r/Namecoin/comments/fjo3qq/we_need_more_testers_for_the_namecoin_tor_browser/fkp6h5v/