[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Dialogue boxes like "Open file" take a long time to display and change and
> you navigate around them.

Any longer than previous versions?

It may just be that, for better or worse, the GTK+ file selection dialog
is slow at scanning a directory and building lists of directories and
files (and not just on Windows, either) - Ethereal doesn't have its own
file selection dialog code, it just uses the code for the GTK+ GUI
toolkit.

> Also when actually loading the file, it can take a long time the first time,
> but is very quick after that.
> Is this normal?

Sometimes it is.

If you have network address to name resolution enabled, and there are IP
addresses in the capture whose host name can't be found using DNS, the
Windows version of "gethostbyaddr()", the OS routine that Ethereal uses
to resolve IP addresses, tries to look up the name in the NetBIOS Name
Service.  That's done by sending a packet to the NetBIOS Name Service
port at that address; if that machine isn't running NetBIOS-over-TCP
(which most non-Windows boxes probably aren't), no reply will come back
(other than an ICMP "port unreachable" message), and "gethostbyaddr()"
will just wait until a reply comes back or it times out, which could
take a while.

However, when the timeout occurs, Ethereal records the failure to look
up that IP address, so it won't try again.  This means that reading a
subsequent file won't stall for a while trying to look up that
particular IP address.

This is not new in 0.9.0.