emacs 21.2.1 slow over DSL

[Dave Lawrence]

I recently upgraded to Redhat 7.3 which comes with emacs 21.2.1 and I've
noticed that it runs a lot slower when I run it remotely through my DSL
connection.  My experience with older versions of emacs (20.7.1 for example)
was that it was a bit slow to open emacs remotely, but once it was open, it
ran acceptably fast.  I just did an experiment where I opened a small file
with 20.7.1 and with 21.2.1 remotely.  It took 16 seconds for 20.7.1 to open
the file and 37 seconds for 21.2.1 to open the same file.  The real problem
for me is that even after the emacs window is up, it seems to take a long time
to do every operation.  For example, I hit c-x c-f to open a second file...
it took 5 seconds for 21.2.1 to prompt me for the new file name; it was under
a second for 20.7.1.

Is this slowness due to the fringes and toolbars that I hear so much about?
If so, I definitely think there should be an option to disable them.  Or is
there something else going on? If so is there a way to fix it? (maybe a
set-variable dsl-really-slow nil command?  ;) )

Thanks for any help.

                          Dave

PS - I have tried to get around this problem using tramp so I don't have to
run emacs remotely, but I'm having troubles with that too.  It waits 60 seconds
and then says it never got a password or shell prompt even though it did get
a shell prompt.  I can't say I've read through all of the manual for tramp
yet, so I might not have it configured quite right.  All I've done it set up
ssh/scp to not require a password and add the following to my .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/emacs/tramp/lisp/")
     (require 'tramp)
(setq tramp-default-method "scp")

Any suggestions about what I'm doing wrong with tramp would be appreciated too,
although I still think there should be a way to run emacs faster remotely
(without unsetenv DISPLAY).