After my update last week from July, I recompiled some applications.  
I noticed an incredible performance hit.  Any idea why such an 
essentially CPU bound use of openssl would have degraded so much?

Indeed, since the current run was with smaller numbers, this time 
should have been much faster than last time:

./qsafe 96 <n2048q0 >n2048s0
# Wed Jul  2 00:14:45 2003 Final 96 Miller-Rabin trials (0 generator)
# Wed Jul  2 16:32:47 2003 Found 16 safe primes of 49480 candidates in 58682 seconds

./qsafe 96 <n1536q0 >n1536s0
# Sat Sep 20 13:57:44 2003 Final 96 Miller-Rabin trials (0 generator)
# Sun Sep 21 15:31:34 2003 Found 11 safe primes of 33284 candidates in 92030 seconds
-- 
William Allen Simpson
    Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32