I have a Fedora 9 distro and for some days, suddenly the MC starts very slow , something like 7 - 8 sec delay.

Any ideas ?

Any chance you recently upgraded to a very recent version of MC, or has your /etc/hosts file changed or been removed?

I experienced a similar thing on a recent installation of Slackware -current, and it was suggested to me that MC may be trying to resolve the machine hostname/IP incase it is going to be used to browse files on a network.

I'm not sure if that is correct, but I put my machine name into my hosts file, along with its IP address, and around the same time, the problem stopped. Now MC starts fast like it always did.

Best of luck,
Sasha

haven't modified or upgraded anything, that's the odd thing.
checked the hosts files and I have 127.0.0.1 so should work

In addition to the loopback address, what I meant was: put your machine's name in there too, along with its IP address. for example, my machine might be called "darkstar" so my hosts file contains:

Sasha