slow xterm startup

[Lev S Bishop <lev dot bishop at yale dot edu>]

This is not a new issue, but at some point in the past year or so, my 
xterm startup time got much much longer. I never really thought about it 
until now because I thought I just needed to defrag my hard drive or 
something, but I've just done a whole bunch of spring cleaning and it's 
still slow. I'm talking about starting a *local* xterm -- starting one 
forwarded from a remote machine takes under 2 seconds, even over a slow 
cablemodem connection. Starting a local xterm takes about 50seconds, if 
its the first one, during which time it's accessing the HDD continuously. 
If I start another xterm immediately afterwards then I guess all the files 
are in the memory cache so it doesn't touch the HDD but still takes about 
20seconds. Other X progs don't take anything like so long (xev, xeyes, 
emacs). It's a 866MHz pentium III, and everything else about Cygwin/X has 
good performance. 

I'm not sure whether it happened when I upgraded from cygwin setup, or 
made some other change to my system. I have, however, tried disabling the 
windows firewall, and unchecked the "enable filesystem realtime 
protection" in norton antivirus (corporate edition, version 7.60.926) and 
neither of these actions made any difference. As far as I can tell, there 
are no references to network shares in my path or elsewhere. I think these 
exhaust the FAQ reasons for poor performance.

During the delay while xterm is starting up, windows task manager lists 
the process xterm.exe as using 97% of the processor time.

One thing that may (or may not) be related to the problem is that xterm 
seems to be linked a lot of times to cygXt-6.dll:
$ cygcheck -v /bin/xterm.exe | grep cygXt-6.dll | wc -l
   2141

Full cygcheck -v /bin/xterm.exe output is attached to this message. Is it 
possible that this is the reason? I assume this output of cygcheck -v is 
similar to what I get from ldd -v on a linux box, which does not have the 
same level of duplication.

Any other ideas of things I might look into?

Thanks,
Lev

Attachment: cygcheck-svr.out
Description: cygceck -s -v -r

Attachment: cygcheck-v_xterm.out.bz2
Description: cygcheck -v /bin/xterm.exe