Ok, I admit it. I'm a horse's rear-end.
After many gripes about Midnight Commander being extremely slow under
2.1.x kernels when stat-ing in large directories, I finally came to my
senses and realized that the target directory was actually a symlink to an
NFS volume :-(. The link is only 10Base-T, so of course it was fairly
slow.
Many, many apologies. I'm not often this dense, but when I am I do it
well. Sorry for the bandwidth and effort wastage <groaning and ducking>.
Steve