Netbeans 6.1 - sluggish on Fedora 9

Ever since moving back to Fedora 9 (from debian) I have found that the netbean IDE seems to be rather sluggish. Switching between source files for example seems to take 4-5 seconds. Opening a menu seems to take at least a second as well. This is rather strange since I didn't have any problem with Fedora 8 and with debian either. Could it be Fedora, xorg, gnome, java or netbeans at fault?

How come KDE is not on the list? I have given up on KDE. It's a write off on Fedora 9.

Most of the suggestions regarding speeding up your IDE deal with tweaking the memory settings - I doubt if that's the problem here. I have plenty of memory to spare and netbeans uses up only about 60 Mb much less than the maximum -Xwhatever specfied in the etc/netbeans.conf files.

Then I found a suggestion that you should change to the metal look and feel if you are on a mac to get a speed improvement. I have no trouble with netbeans on my macbook but I thought i would import the solution to fedora cause the default look and feel is rather lame anyway. To my pleasent suprise I found that switching the LAF does lead to a small performance improvement on F9 as well. It's not much but enough for now (till I get frustrated with it again)

Netbeans is my favourite IDE and I will try to avoid having to switch to eclipse.