Slow Restoration of a template1 Database (ALTER GROUP)

All,

When trying to restore my template1 database (7.3.4) I am
experiencing very long delays. For 600 users (pg_shadow)
and 4 groups (pg_group) it is taking 1hr and 17 minutes to
complete. All of the create user statements are processed in a
matter of seconds, but each alter groups statement takes
about 10 seconds to process. I have done a full vacuum,
reindex (contrib) and restart before my run, but this did
not have an impact on load times. I have also searched
the archives to no avail and modified my postgresql.conf
file as recommended General Bits on www.varlena.com

One other thing to mention is that this restoration has
been occurring on our slave server every hour for the
last 3-4 months and seems to be getting progressively
worse even if new users are not created in our master server.

DUMP: pg_dumpall -g > foo
RESTORE: psql template1 < foo

Cheers,
Ben Young