Solved my Feisty problem too. My laptop was experiencing this startup latency issue when i had no network connection. It seems that it's trying to resolve the hostname. Adding the hostname to 127.0.0.1 solves the problem.
-- [feisty] Slow gnome application startup due to /etc/hosts misconfiguration https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/94048 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is a bug contact for gnome-desktop in ubuntu. -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs