Very strange behaviour!

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

Solved!!!

> - or just littering the startup code with erlang:display("here!")
>   statements... crude but at least an indication of roughly where the
>   slowdown is occurring

Thanks a lot for the idea! I was so frustrated that I couldn't think
straight! :-)

I had installed Spybot, a utility that can track and remove spyware and
other unwanted stuff. It can also set some known host names to 127.0.0.1 in
etc/hosts, so that those plcase can't be reached anymore. The problem was
that etc/hosts became HUGE and it took all that time to put the hosts into
the database....

At least I learned something about the startup procedure. Now I can go back
and try to sell the Erlang concept to the management :-)

regards,
Vlad