Resize/Rebuild Thumbnails Incredibly Slow

i've just installed Gallery2 and i'm already running into trouble doing simple things as I experiment. All I've done so far is set up ONE album in the root album, and uploaded a custom thumbnail for it. I wanted to resize this thumbnail so went into Edit Album and changed the size of the thumbnail, checked off the checkbox to tell Gallery to build new thumbs and then Saved. The script just hangs as it prepares to create a new thumbnail - we're only talking ONE thumbnail here. Using ImageMagick as the graphics toolkit.

thanks for any help in advance

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Gallery version = 2.3.1 core 1.3.0.1
API = Core 7.54, Module 3.9, Theme 2.6, Embed 1.5
PHP version = 4.4.9 apache
Webserver = Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) PHP/4.4.9 mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
Database = mysqlt 4.0.24, lock.system=flock
Toolkits = ArchiveUpload, jpegtran, LinkItemToolkit, Thumbnail, Ffmpeg, ImageMagick
Acceleration = none, none
Operating system = FreeBSD 5.5-STABLE FreeBSD 5.5-STABLE #0: Wed Dec 2 16:50:22 EST 2009
Default theme = matrix
gettext = disabled
Locale = en_US
Browser = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Rows in GalleryAccessMap table = 28
Rows in GalleryAccessSubscriberMap table = 6
Rows in GalleryUser table = 2
Rows in GalleryItem table = 2
Rows in GalleryAlbumItem table = 2
Rows in GalleryCacheMap table = 0