Adding photos hangs the server.

I've had similar problems, starting sometime in the last few weeks or so.
Right now I'm running:

Windows 2000, service pack 3
Sambar Server 5.2 (although the problem was the same when I temporarily
switched to Apache 2.0.35
PHP 4.2.2
Gallery 1.3.1-cvs-b13

When I used the netpbm version found on Gallery download site, It would
almost always hang while executing
fs_exec($cmd, &$results, &$status, $debugfile) in fs_win32.php.
Specifically, it would execute the line reading:
exec("cmd.exe /c $cmd", $results, $status);
but then take a *very* long time to return. Maybe it also hangs in exec() calls in other functions as well, but fs_exec() was the function that I was monitoring.
I thought the server had crashed completely, until I increased
max_execution_time in my PHP config file. The exec() call would usually
complete, but it would take 5-10 minutes to do so.(!!!)
When I execute any of the netpbm programs with the same parameters from a
command line, they execute just fine, no delays at all.

I switched to netpbm 10.6 (the one from
<!-- BBCode Start --><A HREF="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23617&amp;release_id=1" TARGET="_blank">http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23617&amp;release_id=1</A><!-- BBCode End -->),
and the problem is not as bad. I can usually upload a dozen pictures or so,
each one taking about 30 seconds to process (this is on a 800MHz Pentium).
Around that point, however, something goes bad again and it starts hanging
up again, only clearing if I reboot or log out of windows and then log back
in again.

The interesting thing is that until this problem showed I was using the same
stripped down netPBM version that I downloaded from the Gallery site when I
first installed Gallery, about six months ago. I'm not positive, but I
think the problems started when I installed Windows 2000 service pack 3.