I am running 10.15.1 Beta (19B77a). I had thought I had re-installed the normal version of Catalina from Recovery Mode.
I set up a new user, and to my surprise everything is normal. All the apps are opening instantly as they should be. I then removed VirtualBox by clicking and dragging it to the bin and emptying it. However the issue still persists. I did in fact install and open VirtualBox before I realised there was some slow-down. I then restarted thinking that would fix it but then couldn’t get it to boot and hence these issues.
To add to the symptoms, when booting up to my account, sometimes it would seize up and restart again with this message: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Iri0O.jpg. Other times when booting, I would see it stuck on my desktop screen for around 20 mins with no menu bar, no dock and no files on desktop. When it does finally load, every click I press is slow and there’s a 1 minute or so lag with the cursor beachballing. Apps and files barely load.
I managed to run EtreCheck, but I did so from the test user account because I couldn’t run it in my normal account. EtreCheck would stop at 50% on the progress bar and the spinning dial kept going like and it seemed forever. So Instead I just canceled it.
I also ran Apple Diagnostics and there were no errors found.