evince and network drives

You could try telling the app to not remember the recently opened docs.

How?
I actually removed the ev-metadata.xml file in .gnome2/evince, since I found the history of recently opened docs in there. But surprisingly this did not have any effect. Where else could be a configuration file with network paths used by evince?

if you delete the file then rerun evince so a default file is made (also search the rest of your home dir for evince stuff). When it is all defaulted, mark the files as read only. Any changes will not be writable. Bit hacky but should be ok.

I deleted the directory .gnome2/evince and the file .gnome2/accel/evince, but this did not solve my problem. evince still needs about 30 to 40 secs to show up AND suprisingly in the file-menu there is still the history of the last five previously opened files. how can this be?

Then its not stored in that location (clearly). You need to find where it is stored and run:

chmod 440 <file>

This will leave it readable but wil not be writable.

The files you're looking for are now located under ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/. I don't know much about them, but presumably that metadata can now be shared with other applications besides evince. Unfortunately, I can't offer you a better solution than setting the files you find there to read-only.

For reference, I was able to discover these files by making sure that evince was running, and issuing the command:

lsof +D ~ | grep evince

which will give you all files opened by the evince process. I happened to stumble across your question today when I got curious myself as to where evince's memory was. Hopefully it's still helpful.