Tables drop slowly

We are attempting to run a 5 gig script alter script which creates a temp table and populates the temp table with data from another table. The script will then drop the old table and rename the temp table to the old table name. The issue we have is Oracle seems to hang on this statement:
SELECT c.owner#, c.name, c.con#
  FROM con$ c, cdef$ d
 WHERE d.obj# = :1
   AND d.con# = c.con#

The command being executed at the time is the 'drop table XXXX' statement. This occurs on all tables in the script, including zero row tables. Any ideas on how to improve the performance of dropping a table?

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