[wp-hackers] Using WordPress offline

[Rich Pedley]

Hi,

Just had my internet connection go down, first time in quite a while, 
but I noticed an extreme slowdown of WordPress this seems to be caused 
by a call to class-http.

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in 
E:\htdocs\wpbeta\wp-includes\class-http.php on line 1420

which is this:
$theResponse = curl_exec( $handle );

temporarily changing that to ='' does solve the issue, but obviously 
that is just a quick workaround.

Is there any method to totally disable it if/when necessary?

Rich