large document support

[datazone airmail net]

Good Day,
         I searched the list but i have not seen anyone mention this
before, but is there a "usable" limit to a document that gnumeric
can work with?
I recently installed the 1.2.0 release, and feature wise it is very good. 
However, it takes over twice as long to open a csv file compared to excel
on identical hardware.  The box is a p4 2GHz with 512MB running RH9, the
file is 10MB with over 30 cols and over 40,000 rows.  After it is opened,
certain operations like changing the cell formatting of a col or even just
saving the file in standard gnumeric xml format brings the box to its
knees and require me to kill gnumeric after waiting for a long time.
Has anyone else seen this problem, and is there a way to work around it?

Thanks,
Data Zone