Emacs launches excruciatingly slowly

[Ryan Wersal]

I've been utilizing Emacs at work for over a month now and have had a very 
pleasant experience so far. 
The launch time has traditionally been south of 5 
seconds even with my admittedly non-optimized .emacs file.

But that all changed last Thursday. Something happened that caused the startup 
time to skyrocket to a frankly unbelievable 43 minutes. I wish I was kidding.

I have already tried launching Emacs without a config file. This yielded an 
approximately 7 minute or so start up time.

Googling has turned up several posts regarding Emacs being slow due to not 
being 
able to determine it's host's FQDN. 
To this end I have disconnected myself from my 
work's network (unplugging the ethernet cable itself and also disabling the 
adapter from the OS). 
This resulted in normal load times (sub 5 seconds).

This appears to be the source of the issue, but I have no idea where to begin 
looking to solve the problem itself.

Additional info: Windows 7 Professional 32bit running GNU Emacs 23.3.

Any idea where to begin on remedying this situation?

(Potentially more details can be found at my original post on 
http://superuser.com/questions/353201/emacs-launches-excruciatingly-slowly)

Thanks in advance for the assistance,
Ryan Wersal