I recently got a new work machine (3 GHz pentium), which is sitting on an
IPSec network, with the default setup to use LDAP.
The distrubution is SuSE 9 (with KDE 3.1) + official updates.

Besides LDAP being used for username + password lookups,
it seems to be also used for hostname lookups.

Running GNOME is no problem, though I prefer KDE.
Problem is, KDE was about as fast as a snail on a good day;
for example, changing folders in KMail took a very annoyting 20 seconds.
(localhost and the name of the local machine were already in /etc/hosts )

The solution was to disable LDAP via SuSE's Yast2 configurator.
KDE flies like a demon now.

So the question is: why does LDAP slow things down so much ?

OR, alternatively,

if the problem is not with LDAP, it means that KDE is looking up
hostnames and/or usernames all the time. How does one disable
this default beavior ? is this a bug ?