Octave takes forever to load

[Ether Jones]

Hello.

I just installed Octave3.6.4_gcc4.6.2_20130408 to my XP Pro SP3 desktop computer.

Everything works fine so far *except*:

1) Every time I start Octave it takes 30 seconds to load and give me a command prompt.  Is this normal?

2) It takes 90 seconds to load a 2500x2500 matrix.  By comparison, SciLab loads the exact same matrix  in under 2 seconds.  I am using the command N = load("N.dat"). Is there a better way?

Thank you.