Recent (?) problems with gpg

[Jack <ostroffjh users sourceforge net>]

Hello all,

Another strange problem - not really Balsa's problem, but that's where  
I found it.
Today, I found I had a few messages which, when selected, simply froze  
Balsa for something like 30 seconds.  I finally noticed (if I just  
waited and didn't already click on three other things) that there was  
an error from gpg2, trying to fetch the key from pgp.mit.edu.  Manually  
invoking gpg2 from command line had the same delay and error message,  
thus I know the problem is not really in Balsa.
Lots of Googling led me to add the line "standard-resolver" to  
~/.gnupg/dirmngr.com, and then kill the currently running dirmngr  
process.  Although that particular key returned "no data", at least it  
now does so immediately, without the delay (timeout?)
Is this a known problem?  Is it something I should bring up with my  
distro, or directly with gnupg/dirmngr upstream?  All the posts I did  
find refered to older versions of gnupg, I'm now on 2.1.20.
Thanks for any suggestions.

Jack