Really slow loading of minuscule island

I've created a small island by reusing the "Croquet(Master)" island.  All it
does is load in a single character that I'm animating from an external
application, so at startup all you have is the avater (say White Rabbit) and
this character which (copying Mark McCahill's little video) I snarfed from SL,
using Poser to add a couple of extra animations.  Why would this take 2 minutes
or more to load?  Is there some better way of doing this than with obj and bhv
files?	I'm ready to hack code if there's a solution.

Thanks,

Matthew