Following the 10.3.6 update, a few people out there noticed that it took quite a bit longer to get from the login window to your desktop. Apparently having a large number of fonts installed on your system causes 10.3.6 to slow down during the login process. For some like myself, having 1,000+ fonts installed was killing my machine and causing a 10 minute wait time to log in.
The solution is simply to remove as many as you can. A list of default fonts and their locations for Panther is available here should you choose to revert to defaults. In addition, you may find Apple's command line font tools useful. After installing them, you can use this command:
ftxinstalledfonts -f > ~/Desktop/installedfonts.txt
to get a full list of fonts currently installed on your system. When done, you'll find a file called installedfonts.txt on your desktop.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20041126165403605