Extreme slowness in analyzing/downloading build classpath using gradle 3.3

I am helping a colleague get up to speed with gradle, and he is running one of the scripts that I have created. First time he has ever run gradle. He runs this script, using the gradle wrapper, on the same server where I often run gradle. This server has plenty of capacity, and is not extremely busy.

My colleague is runnng gradle, using the 3.3 wrapper, and I find that the initial download is ungodly slow.
He sees
> Loading > buildSrc > Resolving dependencies ':classpath'

followed by a bunch of POM files, one by one. This has been going on for 20 minutes, and has now finally finished downloading all the POMs, and doing its analysis, and has begun downloading jars, still very slow.

I realize that my initial downloads of this stuff happened months ago. probably under a different version of gradle, but this seems just too slow. My colleague has the same gradle.properties as I do, and is on the same machine, as I am.

Do you have any ideas about what we can do to speed this up? There must be something I’m forgetting, but I can’t think of what that might be.

UPDATE: The build finished for my colleague in 28 minutes, almost all of which was occupied by downloading and analyzing dependencies. I then tried the same build myself, after cleaning out my gradle caches, and accomplished the same in about 2 minutes.

Think it was a corporate nexus issue. Not nearly so slow today.