[R] Very slow startup on Win32

[Lowden, James K]

[Duncan Murdoch advised me offlist.  Thanks for your help, Duncan.  I tried to reply directly but your spam filter doesn't like my corporate email setup.]

I turned off all the initialization options I could, and set --verbose.  It seems like each step is slow, rather than racing to one point and stopping for a long time.  

The machine is behind a firewall with an http proxy, and I haven't found out how (if possible) to tell R about it.  Does that matter at startup time?  

Trying to add a package yields:

> local({a <- CRAN.packages()
+ install.packages(select.list(a[,1],,TRUE), .libPaths()[1], available=a)})
trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/1.7/PACKAGES'
unable to connect to 'cran.r-project.org' on port 80.
Error in download.file(url = paste(contriburl, "PACKAGES", sep = "/"),  : 
        cannot open URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/1.7/PACKAGES'

even though that URL works fine in IE.  I understand I should be able to use Rcmd to install packages, but its perl scripts appear to be missing:

$ rcmd  --version
Can't open perl script "D:\Programs\R\rw1070/bin/--version": No such file or directory

Among the commands listed in in the appendix, the only installed script is rw1070\bin\BATCH.  

At the moment, it seems:

1.  I cannot install packages via Rgui, because I don't have nonproxied access to the internet.  
2.  I cannot install packages via Rcmd.

What to do?  

Thanks very much.  

--jkl

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