Incredibly slow warty

[andrew fries]

The computer is Athlon XP 1800 with 512 MB of RAM.

The system is a freshly-installed warty rc1, unmodified in any way.

And the problem is, programs launch incredibly slowly. Booting process 
seems normal, but the problems appear once I enter my login/passwd in 
GDM's login screen. From there, I estimate it took about 10 minutes to 
start Gnome... Now in Gnome, it takes over 30 seconds to start Gedit. 
Yet the system has plenty of RAM, plenty of disk space, there are no 
stray processes eating up processor cycles and hdparm reports dma is on...
What's going on here?