I have a 400 MHz PII running 1.6.2ish.  This has been running gnome1.4
for a while, more or less fine, modulo evolution addressbook issues.
I built gnome2-base from pkgsrc, and evolution 1.4.5.  It seems to
mostly work, but often programs get stuck in RUN for a long long
time.  Amazingly, they tend to get out of this.

 4789 username 64    0  2364K  197M RUN        5:15 54.10% 54.10%  evolution-1.

So this isn't simply 'bloatware is slow', but something much much
worse.  I'm running gnome2 from pkgsrc on my 2GHz P4 (IBM T30), and
some things are non-instant, but it has no really odd hangs -
certainly no where near 1/5 has much as the PII.

So I suspect pth, but I'm up to date there.

Any clues would be greatly appreciated, so I don't end up buying my
wife a Mac :-)

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>