absurdly long startup time for emacs 21.2.1

[Michael Vanier]

Hi,

I'm running emacs 21.2.1 from a Debian GNU/Linux distribution.  When I
start it up, I see this in the minibuffer:

Loading 40mule-ucs (source)...

and the program hangs for about 30 seconds, until it finally comes back to
life.  This only started after I upgraded emacs recently (I don't know the
details since it was part of an automatic Debian update).  Any ideas what's
causing this and what can be done about it?

Thanks,

Mike