Texturing a 1.5K mesh takes as long as a 150M mesh!

Had the same problem, at mine it was a background process that kept using my gpu even though I ended the software.  

Try this:

 

Pause the Texturing

Go to Task manager - Performance tab- click on the Gpu-chart and change the chart from “3D” (I think thats what it usually says) to “Compute_0”.  If theres still activity even after you pause the texturing, theres a process using your resources.  

Then its just to “end tasks” till you find which one it is.

-S