menu_link_save making multiple (60+) duplicate queries on admin/build/modules

The admin/build/modules page continues to baffle me. When I load it I'm getting over 2,500 queries: Executed 2580 queries in 950329.53 milliseconds.

Here are the modules I have enabled.

mysql> select name from system where type ='module' and status=1;
+---------------------+
| name                |
+---------------------+
| webform             | 
| admin_menu          | 
| content             | 
| content_permissions | 
| text                | 
| filefield           | 
| imageapi            | 
| imageapi_gd         | 
| imagecache          | 
| imagecache_ui       | 
| imagefield          | 
| views_ui            | 
| block               | 
| dblog               | 
| filter              | 
| locale              | 
| menu                | 
| node                | 
| path                | 
| system              | 
| trigger             | 
| user                | 
| webform_associate   | 
| workflow            | 
| acquia_agent        | 
| acquia_spi          | 
| pathauto            | 
| token               | 
| views               | 
| devel               | 
+---------------------+
30 rows in set (0.00 sec)

_menu_update_parental_status is also getting called over and over, with UPDATES.

My setup has the webserver and database on different machines, meaning there is a bit more latency in PHP<-->MySQL communication. I'm wondering if this is exacerbating the race condition by opening the window wider.

This might be a duplicate of http://drupal.org/node/302638 - need to confirm, though.

Why is there no caching in these lookups that are being done repeatedly?
3002.73 19 menu_link_save SELECT * FROM menu_links WHERE mlid = 18
Can the menu_links change in the process of loading the admin/build/modules page?

@Damien Tournoud: There was undue latency between the web and database servers. This was making things much worse.

There should never be 61 duplicate select queries on any page. I don't see this issues as being fixed.