A small tip which i found here: http://www.dynasign.nl/blog/?p=9

In short:

Apparently, when STSADM executes, it tries to load strong named assemblies which need to be verified against an authentication provider externally. When your environment has bad network access or no network access, it waites for a timeout before continuing. Which makes provisioning your sites, or any STSADM commands very very slow.

If you dont need it, the trick is to edit your machine config and add:

<configuration>
  <runtime>
  <generatePublisherEvidence enabled=”false”/>
  </runtime>
</configuration>