Bad behavior with C-h i m emacs

[Harry Putnam]

Its almost guaranteed to be some misconfigure on my end since I've
seen no similar reports here.  However, I'm somewhat stumped as to
how to diagnose this behavior, so I'll report what I see and hope
someone recognizes the symptoms.

Running: 
 GNU Emacs 21.3.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, 
 Xaw3d scroll bars) of 2003-07-05 on test
On Redhat Linux 9.

I've installed from cvs several weeks ago and installed info files in
the usual /usr/local/info.  I hadn't noticed this behavior until
returning from a trip of 2wks and attempting to look up something
about abbrev usage.

Start emacs and press C-h i gives me the full menu page as usual, but
then pressing `m emacs <RET>' causes a major stall and emacs resource
usage goes thru the roof. ... Pegged at 99.6.

Kill it with C-g <RET> and it drops into the emacs section of info.
Once there, any further usage of `m' causes the same behavior.  For
example:
`m Distrib <RET>'  causes a major stall and resource usage.

Whereas `g Distrib <RET>' goes quitely to the Distrib node.

Checking /usr/local/info... I see the files there and an entry in
/usr/local/info/dir  for emacs.

I see no problems using the standalone reader and `info emacs'.

C-h v Info-default-directory-list reports:

Info-default-directory-list's value is 
("/usr/local/elisp-manual-21-2.8/" "/usr/local/cvsbook.cvs/" 
"/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/elib-1.0/texi" "/usr/local/wget/doc" 
"/usr/local/bbdb/texinfo" "/usr/local/emacs-lisp-intro-1.05" 
"/usr/local/lib/info" "/usr/local/url/texi" "/usr/local/w3/texi" 
"/usr/local/gnus/texi" "/usr/local/tramp/info/" "/usr/local/info/" 
"/usr/local/share/info/" "/usr/local/gnu/info/" "/usr/local/gnu/lib/info/" 
"/usr/local/gnu/lib/emacs/info/" "/usr/local/emacs/info/" 
"/usr/local/lib/info/" "/usr/local/lib/emacs/info/" "/usr/share/info/" 
"/usr/local/info/")