slow initial ssl sessions

[Derek Doucette]

I have set up a virtual host on my server to access my mail.  It is a
Redhat 7.3 box with the following:
squirrelmail 1.2.10
apache 1.3.2
mod_ssl 2.8.12
openssl 0.9.6b
php 4.3

Whenever I log into squirrelmail, the initial page takes forever to load,
up to a minute or more.  Once this page has loaded, all subsequent pages
load fine.  I am new to SSL and have been having a hard time trying to
pinpoint my problem.  I changed mod_ssl to use /dev/urandom, no luck.  I
do not know if it is an issue with the php script that squirrelmail uses
to redirect or something else.  I also recently was trying to optimize my
httpd.conf hoping something would fix this, and when I run apachectl
startssl, I get an error that tells me that mod_rewrite is not loaded. 
If I run apachectl start, it prompts me for my server crt password and
starts up just fine.  Wouldn't these two directives use the same config
file?  I believe that this is an SSL issue because I have run
squirrelmail unencrypted fine, and after the initial login the sessions
seem to be pretty good, despite the crappy lan I'm on.  The log has no
errors accept when I cancel the transmission from my browser because I'm
sick of waiting.  Does anyone have ideas of where I should begin, I can
provide snippets of config files, but again, I'm very new with ssl so
will need to be somewhat spoonfed.

Thanks in advance,

Derek Doucette
http://derek.homeunix.org