Evo admin home loading problem

I have just uploaded an Evo installation to a new webserver and the Admin Site->home page loads really slowly (say 30s - 1 min), never seen this before. There are no logged system events and the only thing I can find that might be causing an issue is that the news announce and security feeds don’t load and have the following messages:

Failed to retrieve http://feeds.feedburner.com/modx-announce
Failed to retrieve http://feeds.feedburner.com/modxsecurity

Also this in the config tab:

One or more configuration details didn’t check out OK:

Configuration warning: ’register_globals is set to ON in your php.ini configuration file’

Configuration warning: ’GD and/or Zip PHP extensions not found’

Is there a way I can disable trying to load these feeds if that is the problem?

Not that I’m aware of... not without editing a core file, anyway... it could have been that those pages were temporarily unavailable, and that would have really slowed you down.

Anyone else?