Schism hangs when there is a large file in the directory it's started from... It's a problem because I've got a large slackware drive image in my home directory. Can't it be optimised?
There is something wrong with your computer. Schism mmap()s all the files, but it doesn't touch all the pages. I have several large disk images in my home directory and schism has no problems.
Try using strace -p to find out what schism is doing on your system.