Netbeans + Hibernate slow startup if db cannot be found

We are running a Netbeans RCP application which uses Hibernate.  We have no problems with it when running normally.  We were doing some testing the other day which involved starting up the system when there was no internet connection to access the remote database & starting the system when the actual mysql service was not running.

In both of these cases it took netbeans approximately 10 minutes to actually start up the application.  The hibernate/c3p0 timeout is set to 30 seconds (this was the first thing we checked)

if anybody knows what could be causing this or how to fix it help would be greatly appreciated