Yesterday KDE and Gnome were taking an extremely long time to pull up once I logged in.

Deciding that I wanted to reformat my partitions anyway, I reinstalled fresh. Then the same thing happened.

I did find out that my internet was down, but I dont see how that would have any effect.

Also, any program I wanted to load up suddenly took a very long time.

Does anyone have any idea why?

Your internet being down should have no effect unless you have your machine set to go online when it's booting up (doubtful, it would probably give you an error if that was the problem)

It also could well be a hardware problem since you re-installed & had the same problem.

P.S. How long is KDE taking to come up??

It takes well over a minute... but this just started happening. And Win2k and QNX have no issues.

Well that rules out the hardware problem, I'm having kind of a similar problem myself, sometimes it starts in about 15 seconds but other times it's taking over a minute for KDE to load for me aswell & sometimes it dosent bother load at all & I have to reboot to log in to X as amp2000, if I try it as root though it goes in straight away.
Anyone else any suggestions ????

What distrobution are you using? What partitions did you install? I use:

/boot: 31MB
SWAP: 760MB
/: 9459MB

Only installed KDE, no other Desktop Environment. Runs like a dream.

Perhaps try installing another window manager.

Thanks for the help, but it has corrected itself.

Strange, but it started working like normal the moment my cable internet was fixed.

Is it possible that KDE and Gnome slow down when it cannot connect to a network when it thinks it needs to?

I say that because Blackbox and Enlightenment worked fine, with the exception of applications taking a long time to load.

I think that Gnome running Nautilus as the window manager may cause the problem. If someone knows more details than I'm going to report, I'd appreciate their input.

A while ago I upgraded from Redhat 7.0 (using Gnome/Sawfish) -> 7.2 (defaults to Gnome/Nautilus), and went with all defaults. But the installation complained that Nautilus needed xinetd. Why does a window manager require a super-daemon like xinetd (which I don't run)? IIRC, it had something to do with checking for updates; I only found a very vague description. Over-zealous window managers disturb me so I chucked that install.

Perhaps, if you are running Nautilus, it is looking for a working connection and is hanging when it can't find it (say, on domain name resolution possibly)....

Well that would explain Gnome, but whatabout KDE and apps taking such a long time to load up?