Startx is once again taking about 10 seconds for x to start. It used to be practically instantaneous. My two 64 bit laptops and 64 bit desktop exhibit the same anomaly. This slow startup happened once before, but I guess current updates fixed it, until now.

Another problem is with slackpkg update and upgrade. The program stalls for about 10 seconds resolving the mirror - any mirror.
This problem also appeared before, and then fixed itself.

My 32 bit slack current desktop at work still speeds along merrily. Can this be my ISP (Verizon)? I've killed ipv6 with a blacklisting alias.conf file in the /lib/modprobe.d/ directory.

Any ideas why these two problems are occurring again?

Thanks for any help.

Hard to say anything about startx because you did not write what it is trying to run, nor where exactly is it getting stuck.
I suggest that you try and figure out exactly what is it trying to do.

As for slackpkg, it is not a program but a script that uses other tools.
Try and see if you have resolution time issues to other sites (like google for example) with nslookup or ping.

I use blackbox on all 4 computers, because I want a speedy window manager. Startx is very slow - it used to be very quick, but now quick only on the 32 bit slack machine. Pinging times to google seems to be OK, so I sort of suspect my ISP.

What is in /etc/hosts?

What is in /etc/resolv.conf?

What does route say?

Any conflict with dbus (/etc/rc.d/rc.messagebus)?