I am running FC5 on i686-linux (3.2G PentiumD). Normally all is fine. When network is down I notice things like boot slowsdown, cups daemon sits for a long time before timing out, after the login prompt, login in process takes a long long time. Once into the gnome desktop, even starting a terminal window takes 30 to 40 seconds. CPU activity is minimal so thats not an issue.

Also I see this slow down if network dies after I am up and running fine. I am connected to a local router which goes to dsl modem service.

Any ideas why this should be hanging things like it does?

different stuff you setup to start on reboot are looking for connectivity which they dont find and search and search and search and search........until it timesout. so to reduce this either be connected to your network, or you could decrease the timeout time in the proper files.

As a start I set DHCP_TIMEOUT=5 in /etc/sysconfig/network.