rails incredibly slow, 30 seconds for rails -h

I've installed rails on my dual core rather fast toshiba laptop. Everything but rails seems to work just fine.However "rails -h" takes over 30 seconds to display the help. It takes a few seconds even to display the version.

Doing things like "rails demo" take many minutes but finally complete. Starting the rails app takes many minutes (about 30) but then finally the browser brings up the Welcome aboard page. It's running well, just incredibly slowly.

Ruby itself appears to run just fine, though I don't have any applications as large as rails to compare.

Advise me, please. Thanks!

Perhaps worth reporting: when running rails -h, the CPU meter is pegged essentially all the time, with ruby.exe consuming one whole core.

We've managed to show that Ruby itself runs very slowly on my machine. I'll take the question back to the Ruby list. Will report if anything interesting comes up and would appreciate a direct email if you have any really good ideas.

The two laptops seem neck and neck except running Ruby.

Thanks,

R