>This sort of slowdown is what you might see if your system started paging to disk (i.e. ran out of physical RAM). Is it possible that's happening?

No, when I saw this slowdown it prompted to me to install the extra 256MB memory strip that I had sitting around. Doubling the physical memory made no difference at all in the build time.

It didn't surprise me because there was very little disk activity during the build even before I added memory.

BTW, I'm using a Dell Optiplex GX100 (Win 2000) with a 700 mhz Intel chip (X86 Family 6 MOdel 8 Stepping 6).

Peter