Screen startup is really slow

Hello,

For some reason, screen and "screen -ls" takes an exorbitant amount of time.

I am trying to run screen on a network server running RHEL 5.7.  I'm logging on with my LDAP account. The screen version is 4.00.03.

Just a thought, does screen attempt to go out to the network at all? (Please pardon my lack of understanding)

From strace, looks like running screen goes through a series of sleep cycles but I'm not sure why. I mean, it looks like it repeatedly tries to talk to a unix auth server, and then something says EBADF (Bad File descriptor), then later it says "screen: nss_"... (I assume something failed and it goes to sleep. The sleep time doubles each time).

Eventually, screen does load but I shouldn't have to wait a couple minutes each time right?

Any help or guidance is appreciated.

Thanks,
Kitty