From: rpearcea@gmail.com   
      
   I can tell you what Maple does, but can you post your system?  Maple's linear   
   solver attempts to preserve sparsity and control size during pivot selection.    
   For symbolic linear systems, it will do a lot of arithmetic with polynomials   
   and rational    
   functions.  Maple is highly optimized for that.  Theoretically, it is not   
   practical in most cases to symbolically solve linear systems and then evaluate   
   the solution.  In fact, a fast way to solve the system symbolically is to   
   repeatedly plug in numbers    
   and solve numerically, and then interpolate :)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)