Dom3 Strange Startup Pause - Linux - utf8

[Jagdpanther]

On the same Linux PC that I have been playing Dominions 3 on for a couple of years, I just switched to using UTF-8 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8). There only seems to be one anomaly on the system: when I start up Dominions 3, there is about a ten second pause where the screen freezes and is unresponsive to the mouse. After this pause Dominions 3 and everything else works again. I Notice the following lines show up in two logfiles:

==> Xorg.0.log <==
(WW) Jun 01 21:41:43 NVIDIA(0): WAIT (2, 7, 0x8000, 0x0000fb40, 0x0000179c)
(WW) Jun 01 21:41:50 NVIDIA(0): WAIT (1, 7, 0x8000, 0x0000fb40, 0x0000179c)
(WW) Jun 01 21:41:55 NVIDIA(0): WAIT (2, 7, 0x8000, 0x0000f970, 0x00001600)

==> messages <==
Jun  1 21:42:00 runner kernel: NVRM: Xid (0001:00): 8, Channel 00000001

Any ideas about the pause?