I finally got the pkg tools system to work. When I compiled bootstrap, it took 4hrs -- so I killed it and restarted it when I went to bed. The following morning, bootstrap was still compiling. Each step/instruction takes about 15 seconds.
I downloaded lesstif.tar.gz from sourceforge. /bin/ksh .configure was half done in about 30s. It did not complete because a required lib was not found. Why am I seeing such a discrepancy in execution speeds?