After upgrade: timeout when starting emacs

[Brandon Kuczenski <brandon@301south.net>]

I am running Emacs 21.4.1 on Debian.  I recently upgraded from probably 
21.3, but I don't know for sure what version I was running previously. 
With the present version, every time I start emacs, there is a 5-second 
timeout that occurs when it tries to execute the following command from my 
.emacs file:

(set-default-font "-*-medium-r-normal-*-15-*-iso8859-*")

I did not have this delay in the prior version.

I tried running emacs from strace, but didn't get any information that was 
useful [to me].

I suspect it may be trying to contact a font server, of which there isn't 
one.  Would that make sense?  Is there a way for me to change its 
behavior?

Thanks,
Brandon