Gnome performance question

[Bob Smith]

I have RH9, but have noticed the same situation with a Fedora installation.
Both of these installations are "as is," out of the box.  The hardware
is a 2.4 GHz Pentium on RH9 and 3.1 GHz Dell Optiplex GX280, respectively.

There are times when the windowing system comes as close to freezing as
you can get, and then it takes a long time to launch a window or terminal.
I can sit and watch the "Starting terminal" message for a period of time
before it actually shows up.  Sometimes, especially being left for a while,
or even overnight, it takes a long time to "get to its feet."  At the same
time, logging in from the outside is not too bad.

Is there a reason for this?  More importantly, is there anyway to get
better windowing performance?

Thanks,

-Bob