"Gradle: refresh scala model data" taking 15 minutes

Using latest community edition of IDEA on doing a gradle refresh of my project it always gets stuck in a mode of:

"Gradle: refresh scala model data"

for a reeeeeeeally long time (> 15 minutes) before continuing and the whole IDE is locked during this time.

I have no scala code in the project, but dependencies on scala based libraries, primarily akka.

A 'gradlew build' from the terminal is resolved with no such hiccup.