Hauke Fath wrote:
> The machines offer KDE, Gnome, XFCE4 and your favourite window 
> manager as environment via gdm, but the problem seems to concern all 
> of them. As an example, when I log in to XFCE4, first opening of a 
> popup menu from xfce4-panel takes 15 sec on an AMD 700 MHz / 384 MB 
> RAM. During that time, system load is around 2, there are still > 100 
> MB RAM unused, there is disk activity, and xfce4-panel is busy 
> consuming cpu time. The next menu then appears instantaneously. 
> Similar under Gnome: A Gnome terminal takes around 15 sec to appear, 
> a KDE konsole 20 sec, and even an xterm needs 10 sec.

Have you traced them? Font loading time is very likely the issue. My
apps seemingly spent most and too much time at that step as well. Albeit
it's not as horrible as in your examples.

-- 
Christian