At some point in the history of my blog I had installed a plugin that activated a piece of wordpress code that duplicated all post meta-data custom fields into each post.  This resulted in my database being crammed full of  meta-data for each post that did not use that meta-data.  While this did not affect the look of the post it certainly added some size to my database.

I would have not noticed the problem if it hadn’t been for Firefox crapping out because it was waiting for a javascript to finish running.   I researched  the problem and found this bug topic on WordPress support.  (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/190244)

The fix had since been rolled into WordPress 2.7 and everything seems fine.  This however didn’t fix the existing slow load times of the javascript code that was attempting to retrieve all the custom meta-data into the new post screen.

I had to manually delete all the duplicate  meta-data from the wp_postmeta.  Once I did that the add new post screen in  wp-admin worked like a champ.   The UI continues to show the custom fields during new post entry but it does not save it upon publish.

I hope this helps some one who is having the same probelm.