Linked Objects are Very Slow to Load

Greetings,

I’ve created a scene with a few linked objects for which I made proxies (ctl-opt-p), but, while my render only take about 60 secs, the synchronizing of the objects takes five minutes. Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something? Or is this normal behavior. My doesn’t have that many objects (a small area of ground, a couple rocks, three pebbles used in a particle system, six grass models used in a particle system). It seems initializing the scene shouldn’t take so long. I hope to use this scene in a short animation (with ants).

My scene:


I’m running Blender 2.67 on OS X, 3.49 GHz i7, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 570 1280MB x 2

Your help is appreciated,
MattVG

UPDATE: apparently quitting and reopening Blender has fixed the issue. Now it takes 20 secs to synchronize objects.