21.4 hangs in the absence of a net connection

If my dialup network connection drops, but the nameserver is still running, XEmacs hangs evidently forever, trying to learn something about its network environment. "strace xemacs -q" shows that it gets stuck in poll(2), looking for data from the nameserver. Oddly, this occurs on systems where /etc/nsswitch.conf contains "hosts: files dns" and /etc/hosts contains entries for both localhost and the machine's own name. If the link is dead *and* the nameserver is also dead, XEmacs does not delay startup. If the nameserver is killed manually after XEmacs has gotten into the poll(2) wait, it resumes initialization after some timeout. Why should XEmacs care at all about network matters during startup? And even if it has a reason to care a little, shouldn't there be failover handling, so as not simply to sit dead? I waited about 10 minutes the first time this occurred, leading to my conclusion that XEmacs seemingly will hang forever in this case. --karl