Ubuntu hardy-orca very irresponsive

[Krandor]

Hello,
Let's start saying that I'm pretty new to this wonderful operating system that is ubuntu. Being blind, I have been using Orca since release 6.10 Edgy, and have since upgraded as time went by.ò
But I have a problem now, with hardy: orca seems really sluggish. I'm using espeak, but the speech is really irresponsive, to the point of frustration. My machine isn't that bad either, it's a 3.2 ghz pentium 4 with 1 gig of ddr ram in it.
The problem is only present with speech, infact with braille everything works as expected.
Today a strange fact happened too. I was trying to view a site in firefox. Orca quitted automatically, I re-launched it and..surprise? everything worked fine. But when I logged back in the problem came again.

What can I do?

Regards
Tom

[JohnCarcinogen]

Hi there,

I'm a little new to Linux and very new to Orca, but I was having some troubles myself with the app, so I did some searching and came up empty.

Fortunately, I did the next best thing - process of elimination - and found out that my firewall (Firestarter) was causing a lot of conflicts.

Try it out; if you use a firewall app, start it up, then start up Orca - run as usual. Then, kill the firewall app, and check on Orca to see if it improves.

Otherwise, you can always look at what else you're running to see if it's a problem.

Hope this helps!