Comment 5 for bug 128521

I also encountered this bug. It is extremely annoying and difficult to find the fix to it.

Besides delay when opening applications from the gnome menus/desktop, I also had long delays when openning the midnight commander from terminal or just the midnight commander editor (mcedit), some strange delays / random freezes while editing messages in Evolution - all fixed when I added the hostname back to the hosts file.

All this started when I was trying to get samba to work, so I guess I added the workgroup in the network-admin, however I wasn't able to reproduce the bug this way again.

Anyway, it's very easy to reproduce the bug by simply deleting your hostname from the hosts file.