Extremely Slow Dialogues in JDK141 on Linux RH 7.3!!!

I installed the latest JDK 1.4.1 on my RH 7.3 laptop and noticed that dialogue boxes are dog slow. For example, running the the SwingSet2 demo (comes with the JDK), even messages boxes take like 10+ seconds to draw. The frame pops up immediately, its just the contents (buttons, widgets etc) that take time to draw.
You can run the same demo under jdk 1.3.1 in dialogues are fine and snappy and Swing in general runs well.

I have tried several VMs, tinkered around with my X stuff and toyed with VM -X option as well as java2D options; nothing has helped.
HELP! I would like to use JDK14!!!
Here are the specifics of my machine:
RedHat 7.3 Distro
Toshiba Tecra 8100 Laptop (256mb ram; PII 700mhz)
XFree86-4.2.0-8 + Gnome 1.4
Linux boingo.intelixinc.com 2.4.18-3 #1 Thu Apr 18 07:37:53 EDT 2002 i686 unknown

This VM works well:
-------------------
java version "1.3.1_04"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.3.1_04-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.3.1_04-b02, mixed mode)
These VMs are dog slow with dialogues (Swing in general seems slow but tollerable):
-----------------------------------------------------------
java version "1.4.0_01"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.0_01-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.0_01-b03, mixed mode)
java version "1.4.1"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1-b21)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1-b21, mixed mode)
java version "1.4.0"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.0)
BEA Weblogic JRockit(R) Virtual Machine (build 7.0-1.4.0-linux32-mortae-20020830-1744, Native Threads, Generational Concurrent Garbage Collector)