In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, I was without network service for 2 days. I had several machines with Slackware 14 installed. I use just a window manager (fvwm), no desktop system. After logging in, when I typed 'startx', it took an excurciatingly long time -- minutes -- for X to come up. I tried this with my .xinitrc moved aside and the result was the same. It appears that there is some sort of dependency on a working network in the course of bringing up X, which, if true, is a bit bizarre. In any case, this was a real problem in trying to use these machines without network service.

I have a Toshiba netbook -- NB505. Booting the default (huge) kernel on this machine results in a long pause and then an error in udev. After this, battery status did not work correctly. I apologize for not providing details -- I no longer have Slackware installed on this machine -- but I may be able to get them by booting the Slackware install DVD. If that proves to be the case, I will report them here and try to file a bug report.

It could possibly be related to the "hostname=`hostname -f`" entry in the /usr/bin/startx script. Try changing it to "hostname=`hostname`" (essentially just remove the "-f" switch). There were some posts here a few weeks ago where someone had the same delay issue after running startx.