strange lynx behavior

[Patrick Olson <compman@internetcds.com>]

I am having a very strange problem running Lynx on my other computer.  I
downloaded the .deb from Debian stable to this computer.  Here, it runs
fine as a normal user (haven't tried it as root).

Then I use FTP to transfer the .deb to my other computer over my LAN. 
dpkg -i lynx<version info>.deb worked without any complaint.  Lynx runs
fine as root, but when I try to run it as a normal user, it just sits
there.  I type lynx and hit enter, and the cursor moves to the next line
and nothing more happens.  I find the info below rather interesting as
well:

before:
$ uptime
 10:02am  up 46 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.15

after 1 minute:

$ ps
  PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
 1058   1 S    0:00 -bash
 1063  p0 S    0:00 -bash
 1070   1 R    1:00 lynx
 1075  p0 R    0:00 ps
$ uptime
 10:03am  up 48 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.63, 0.20, 0.19

Now, it looks like Lynx has ran the CPU quite a bit, but the computer
hardly even bothers to access the hard disk during this time.  This is an
AMD K6 under rather light load.  Lynx loads in well under a minute on my
old 386!

I have a hard time believing a software bug, as I believe lynx used to run
just fine on this machine.  I had goofed something up yesterday, so I
dumped everything and re-installed.

Here's the before and after on the memory:

$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         30264      26352       3912       8920        380      21188
-/+ buffers/cache:       4784      25480
Swap:       128484       1076     127408
$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         30264      26356       3908       8936        380      21188
-/+ buffers/cache:       4788      25476
Swap:       128484       1072     127412

Any suggestions that might help me get to the bottom of this would be
greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Patrick Olson