I found an interesting (to me at least!) pdf on the web:
http://www.systemed.plus.com/New_Adl...lway_Atlas.pdf

What's really bizarre is that it opens quickly and without problem under WinXP with Acrobat Reader 6, yet at home under Linux (Ubuntu 6.06, Gnome, kpdf) attempting to open it slows the system to a crawl - disk is thrashing and even after 5 mins there's still nothing to see in the kpdf document window other than crossed diagonal lines. Closing kpdf still leaves something running in the background as the disk is still thrashing and the system is so slow as to be useless.

The document has the following properties:

New_Adlestrop_Railway_Atlas.pdf
Creator: Adobe Illustrator 9.0
Producer: Adobe PDF library 4.800
Version: PDF-1.3

When seen as an icon in the file browser the image contained in the document is present.

Can anyone explain this? Should I file a bug report on kpdf?
What else can I use to view the document?

BTW Hardware is Lenovo laptop 1.66GHz CPU 512MBytes RAM.

This is a big PDF with a lot of fine detail. It opens fine with kpdf, but zooming in is a little slow, and I can "feel" my cpu struggle (eg the fan starts, which usually means it is working hard).
The system I used to test this is: CPU 1.8GHz, with 1GB RAM, Kubuntu 6.06.1, kpdf 0.5.2
Zooming in with that PDF, top shows kpdf using 99.9% CPU and 85% RAM. Repeated zooming-in eventually crashed kpdf

So, either this is a "badly constructed PDF" (Eg 24-bit colour specified, when there are only about 6 colours actually used), or kpdf needs to manage this sort of file better.
You could try another pdf viewer and see if it handles this file any better.