localhost (windows) performance

I have a friend I asked to load postgres 8.3 on his XP machine. He then
tested a python script which accesses several tables and discovered that it
retrieves data very slowly. It takes about 20 seconds to retrieve the data -
on localhost. However, using a remote connection to a postgres database
(mine) over the internet and running the same python script it takes only 12
seconds. The difference of 8 seconds makes no sense - the remote is
completely on the other coast.

I then thought it had something to do with the data -although the data set is
small. I did a complete dump and restored on his machine and again got the
same results. The machine has a recent motherboard with 2 gb of ram. It
does not appear to be swapping out ram.

Using my local XP (accessing the LINUX database on the LAN) runs the same
python script in just under 3 seconds (most of the time is in loading the
GUI).

One other major difference is I'm running postgres8.2 on linux.

Anybody, have a suggestion - I'm not a windows guru. Or is this normal for
windows?
--
John Fabiani