amaroK runs extremely slowly when I start it - slow enough that at I thought it had frozen until it appeared a minute or so later. The first time it occured I had no configuration, it has continued to occur since. It will do nothing for a long time, then appear and start slowly filling in the widgets. I have not tried to scan my library yet, or even told amarok where it is. I get an hourglass mouse when I mouse over it, and any clicks take a long time to register. It is not using very much cpu (KDE System Guard shows 0%, it's nowhere on screen in top) and everything else runs fine during all of this. Starting up amarok from a bare X session with an xterm produces the same problem.
My home directory is on an NFS share. Could this cause the problem? I used to run amarok when I had gentoo and that didn't seem to affect it, but that was a couple point releases ago.
Output of amarokapp when started from a terminal:
QLayout "unnamed" added to QVBox "unnamed", which already has a layout
QLayout: Adding KToolBar/mainToolBar (child of QVBox/unnamed) to layout for PlaylistWindow/PlaylistWindow
STARTUP
I run Amarok at work on an NFS-mounted home directory and it does perform poorly, although nowhere near as bad as you describe.
Maybe you have a locking issue?
(I suspect SQLite has something to do with my slowness, as it always happens when switching songs, regardless of whether the song is on the NFS share or not. I don't really consider that a bug.)