I mentioned the lag problem again recently. The short and sweet version is that anything that tries to access the serial port that the Dectalk is on in any way will slow it to a crawl. For whatever reason, the HAL daemon is one such program that probes serial ports. It is quite poorly documented, and I have yet to find out if there is a way to prevent this. Since the HAL daemon is pretty much required for any work with Gnome, I have avoided it until this bug can be resolved. I'd bet some distros will probe serial ports at install time, looking for a modem or something. That would also trigger the bug.
