Actually I was going to report the same thing for Windows XP SP 3.
In the (ugly) console I always see a starting: Unable to find: DialogGridArrange ** (inkscape.exe:2524): WARNING **: Unknown verb name: DialogGridArrange followed by a lot of: (inkscape.exe:2524): Pango-WARNING **: couldn't load font "<...>", falling back to "Sans 10", expect ugly output. which take a lot of time to scroll away one by one, but the biggest delay seems to happen before anything is written out.
Also, recently (last week) I'm experiencing a lot of crashes, usually while ungrouping objects: the document gets emergency-saved correctly but without the objects I was ungrouping which are completely lost. Today I've got a PDF file that when imported refuses to be zoomed in: at some point black bars appear and everything blows up. One of the many times I tried to open it, it took a huge amount of time to load and after that a "low system memory" dialog appeared then it got opened (and crashed after zooming as all other times). These may be unrelated issues but I started experiencing them almost in the same period as the big(ger) startup delay.
It looks like during the startup there is some heavy memory operation taking place. I suspect that something is not being allocated or released correctly so after the file is loaded you may happen to do some operation on that data triggering the crash. This is just an impression, anyway: I've not tried with gdb because on my Pentium IV it takes ages to start up and after that it's almost unusable for the unmanageable delays in the interface.
-- View this message in context: http://inkscape.13.x6.nabble.com/win32-really-long-initial-startup-times-on-... Sent from the Inkscape - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.