Remember that someone commented that "they had heard" this could be the cause. We do not know that for sure.
cd /usr/share/locale du -s .
On a workstation install, that directory is 189MB. glibc-common is 43MB, mostly translations.
"Stripping out" all other languages is, I hope to God, simply not an option.
It's a legitimate option if you do it post-install. Debian, I believe, has a script that strips out unused languages.
