Octave suddenly slow

[Scott A. McDermott]

Hello list ---

Sorry for my first post here to be a problem instead of something
helpful, but I'm awful stuck...

I'd been using the Octave Windows binary merrily for over a year, most
recently (in July) downloading 3.0.1 to a freshly-wiped hard drive.
Last time I used it was about two weeks ago, again everything fine.

Today I ran it again and it runs insaaaaaaanely slowly.  What it looks
like is, each line I run --- anything at all, as simple as "cd .." or
"version" or "for x=1:100,x,end" --- pops the CPU usage to 100% for ~3
seconds, and then actually executes.  As you can imagine, actually
running a .m file now takes several minutes where it had been a few seconds.

I've tried uninstalling and re-installing; I've tried going to version
3.1.50; I've tried running Octave (version 3.0.2) under Cygwin instead
of the stand-alone binary.  Same behavior all around.

So now the interesting question: What changed in that two weeks?

I've installed the following apps:

- Cygwin with X support
- Gimp
- NetBeans 6.1

Note that I only downloaded the Cygwin version of Octave today, trying
to work around this problem.  I'm happy to uninstall any of these apps
but my fear is that the problem is a "newer, better" .dll that came with
one of these apps that won't be eliminated.

My biggest concern (in addition to suddenly not being able to do my
work) is that I don't even know what to look at to diagnose this any
more.  Any help at all would be deeply appreciated, and I'll of course
try to return the favor to the Octave community when I can!

Thanks ---
--Scott