Pan2 Very Slow

After a recent upgrade to Debian 4.0 (Etch), I decided to try to
upgrade from pan 0.14.2.91 to pan 0.127.  To my surprise, downloading
new headers from news groups has slowed down by almost a factor of
fifty.

On a currently executing download of new headers, pan 0.127 is averaging
8.7 new headers per second, while 0.14.2.91 could average better than 450.

Is this intentional?  Is there a configuration option I can set to speed
this up?  Is there some kind of temporary work around (use a different
method to get the headers as a text file, then load them into Pan, or
something similiar) that I can use to speed this up?

I would go back to 0.14.2.91 but I really wanted to give this version
a fair try, so I'll let this run for a few hours to try to get a better
average (but it would take to long to let it complete downloading all the
new headers in this group, so I'll shut it down after two hours).

The GUI is a lot less responsive than 0.14, and it regularly hangs for
long periods of time (20 to thirty seconds).  On doing some reading,
I've found some emails that suggest that the new version is not
multi-threaded.  I would suggest a minimum of three threads: One for
the GUI, one for the encoder/decoder task, and one for data up/down load.
Experiments with the news readers I've written show this as a nice
balance between responsivness and network bandwidth usage.

Thanks,
John S.