I don't appreciate GUIs that take a measurable amount of time to drop down a menu, open a dialog, or switch tabs, when they are otherwise not doing much, and the machine is not otherwise busy. Especially on a 1.2 GHz athlon there is no excuse at all for this. Unfortunately I suspect this version is broken by design - like Java Swing.
emerge --info, please... Also some debugging info, like strace would be handy. Can't reproduce this one. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/bugzilla-howto.xml