My Linux box have become extremely slow when starting new programs. No matter what command i type it will take about 15 seconds before i get any response.

ie: I try to do a remote login with PuTTy and the after i type in my username it takes 15secs before I'm asked for my password. Also when i run KDE and click on an icon it can take about 30 secs before the application starts.

I believe that this happened after i installed a second network card in the box and if I'm not mistaken they share the same IRQ (IRQ 9). I have PnP OS enabled in BIOS.

Any ideas or suggestions would make me very happy!

Well if your system ran fairly smoothly before installing the new network card, then most likely that is the problem. Have you tried reconfiguring this card or maybe removing it to test the speed of your machine ? That's what I would do.

Thanks for your help, I diagnosed the problem as not having anything to do with my two NICs. Although i still think it is strange that they seem to be sharing IRQ.

I found the problem to be with my firewall rules (iptables). I had set the policy to drop all packets on INPUT but hadn't enabled loopback connections. I can't understand how this could be the problem, but thats another story :)

Best regards,
Niklas

maybe because x is working like a server on your machine nearly same thing happened to me to i connect to internet eith dsl and dhcp always give my box a hostname like host97.belsouth.net and before changing that it took ages to load a program and when i changed the hostname everthing worked smooth and and before changeing hostname there was always a network activity while opening progs

Interesting, my machine is configured the same way (gets hostname from ISP). Thanks for your help!