kde pauses during startup

[Claire <spiriel@ntlworld.com>]

i installed a fresh woody yesterday, and during first boot, kde took < 60 
seconds to load.  any attempts to load kde since then take > 7 minutes for 
kde 2.2.2 and ~5 minutes for 3.0.x.  the splash screen halts at "initialising 
system services" (the 2nd icon) for a couple of minutes, before the splash 
vanishes altogether and the system does nothing, clearly waiting for a 
timeout or 3 before finally loading.
some applications take over a minute to load, konq being one
the system is a PII 400 w/ 128MB ram krnl2.4.18

if anybody has ANY ideas how to help, please cc me
thank you