Recently emacs hangs on startup due to ESS

[John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com>]

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been having some issues with emacs
hanging on startup. I usually kill the process, but inadvertently left
it in the background today, noting much later that it ended up
starting. I played with commenting out various parts of my config
until I narrowed things down to the line:

(require 'ess-site)

the message buffer displays "enabling speedbar support" for a
reeeaaally long time before it eventually starts up.

I tried debug-on-signal and eval-expression-debug-on-error... I'm not
sure what is supposed to happen with debug options, but no debug
buffer pops up. The only lines that appear relevant in *Messages* are:

ad-handle-definition: `ess-indent-command' got redefined
ad-handle-definition: `ess-eval-line-and-step' got redefined

How might I diagnose this further?. I'm not familiar with chasing down
Emacs issues other than narrowing it down to a config file option.

I can reproduce this with:
- emacs -Q
- putting this in the buffer

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/ess/lisp")
(require 'ess-site)

- M-x eval-region on the above two lines


Thanks for any suggestions,
John