Problem with ls on home directory

Hello,

I am facing strange problems with running ls on my home directory. I issue
ls, it sits and waits around for 2-5 minutes before it responds. The same
happens when I try to do any file operations with other applications (like
attaching something to my email). Its almost as if it is timing out for
something. This does not happen anywhere else down the directory tree.

To find out what was going wrong, I issued strace ls, which ran immediately.

What do I check ?

GC