Slow launch times on Windows 7

[Jeff Massung]

Jacqueline,

Have all the standard tests been tried and eliminated? Also, completely
ignore any defrag suggestions. That would only help if the app was accessing
a metric ton of files at startup, in which case there's other things to be
done to help that instead of asking a customer to perform a 6+ hour
operation just for a simple test.

At the top of the my list would be:

* Permissions launching the file causing a problem?

For a big company where a username is set to a domain that might be managed
in another state, this can cause issues if setup incorrectly. Usually not,
and I'm not sure how a reinstall would help unless they altered the settings
for how your app was installed (read: all users have equal permissions).

* Is there network activity during launch?

This could be a number of things, but if at startup there is a lot of
network activity going on, that's where I'd focus the majority of my
attention is solving the issue. Does your app ping your website for a
license key check or anything similar? Perhaps they are doing something
special to log their users' activities (ala keylogging software)? Many
programs can be used to check this.

* Are there are lot of files being accessed at application startup?

For many apps, this is a serious bottle neck. Disk reads are incredibly
fast, but opening and closing files is incredibly slow. If the app scans
folders to build trees or anything else at startup, this would be something
to look into as well. This would also combine with the next test... (Again,
there are apps out there to let you watch DLL, process, and disk access of
your running process at startup).

* Anti-Virus settings set way too high?

Sometimes when anti-virus software is installed the settings are blasted all
the way as high as to scan an entire executable (or DLL!!) when it's first
loaded to see it can find anything wrong with it. Rev (and many other apps)
load a lot of DLLs on startup and if all of those get equally checked, it
could be a problem.

Hopefully some of these suggestions lead to some answers for you. Here at my
work, these usually ended up causing us problems at one time or another at
just the wrong times (isn't that always the case? :-)).

Jeff M.