Comment # 4 on bug 1175930 from David Rankin

I can confirm this behavior of slow mc start (on a seeming random basis) on
Arch, but I haven't seen it on openSUSE yet. Some Arch boxes have no issue, on
one it takes 30 seconds (a very long 30 seconds) for mc to start. 

As a workaround, using -u --nosubshell allows mc to start normally on the box
with the problem. There are many references to this issue around the net, but
no solution I could find.