Has there been a modification of some APIs in Mac OS X 10.3.9 that
could explain why Mail.app and Safari.app hang (2 minutes to
complete launch on a fast G5) in the [NSHost currentHost] call when
you launch them for the first time?
As this Cocoa API potentially deals with network related stuff, I
wonder if a bug would not have been introduced in a security update
for 10.3.9 as I've not seen this problem previously.
I don't believe we touched the NSHost code at all for any security
update.