Can you run those two queries with psql?
I remember having some trouble running multiple queries in the same pgadmin process.  Both would get stuck until both finished I think.  I went to running a pgadmin process per query.
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Robert James 
<srobertjames@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for the replies.  I'm running Postgres 8.2 on Windows XP, Intel Core Duo (though Postgres seems to use only one 1 core).
The queries are self joins on very large tables, with lots of nested loops.
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 9:40 PM, Tom Lane 
<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Chris <
dmagick@gmail.com> writes:
 > Robert James wrote:
 >> Hi.  I'm seeing some weird behavior in Postgres.  I'm running read only
 >> queries (SELECT that is - no UPDATE or DELETE or INSERT is happening at
 >> all).  I can run one rather complicated query and the results come
 >> back... eventually.  Likewise with another.  But, when I run both
 >> queries at the same time, Postgres seems to ground to a halt.
> They're probably not blocking each other but more likely you're
 > exhausting your servers resources. If they return "eventually"
 > individually, then running both at the same time will take at least
 > "eventually x2".
It could be a lot more than x2.  If the two queries together eat enough
 RAM to drive the machine into swapping, where it didn't swap while
 doing one at a time, the slowdown could be orders of magnitude.
 Watching vmstat output might be informative --- it would at least give
 an idea if the bottleneck is CPU, I/O, or swap.
                        regards, tom lane