I have also been experiencing this problem. Lo and behold, --verbose indicates that I am also hanging at the line:
23:27:00.881 [I] hald.c:82: Added device to GDL; udi=/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_IOMEGA_ZIP_100_ATAPI_Floppy I got an ltrace, but it's 113MB uncompressed, (3.4M gzipped) which leads me to think I'm doing something wrong. If this and an strace would be useful, I'll send them along.
