Followup: Thought I'd post the solution.

Using a wireshark they were able to look up the return packets that the vax emulator was sending out. Turns out it was sending out requests asking what sort of Terminal perl was... it would then time out, resend the request, and double the time out (4+8 seconds delayed...)...

they ended up turning off that feature on the server side, something about a sysconfig block setting (I'm not a vme lover... I didn't get the exact command), though I suppose you could have Net::Telnet send the terminal type back... which caused the system to no longer delay.

--Ray