Setting up light.zwave taking too long and pychromecast throwing errors

I have been running home assistant on ubuntu 18.04 (laptop) 0.87.1 Python 3.6.7

For the past couple of days, light.zwave is taking forever to setup with the following message stuck for 9 minutes before anything moves forward. Hence, restarting hass takes around 10-12 minutes. (this laptop is i5 with 8gb memory and SSD)

Feb 20 08:25:31 vaioduo hass[20250]: 2019-02-20 08:25:31 INFO (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.light] Setting up light.zwave

I don’t get failures on light.zwave but this is followed by error and warning on pychromecast as below:

Feb 20 08:33:49 vaioduo hass[20250]: 2019-02-20 08:33:49 ERROR (Thread-2) [pychromecast.socket_client] Error reading from socket.
Feb 20 08:33:49 vaioduo hass[20250]: 2019-02-20 08:33:49 WARNING (Thread-2) [pychromecast.socket_client] Error communicating with socket, resetting connection

All integrations seem to be working fine but this has started to happen only in the last 3 days… I did try and setup homeassistant on another box with similar results when I enable the zwave: and light: components in the config file.

Any pointers would be good.