[ElDiabloConCaca]

Well, after a restart, they launched faster... a LOT faster. Two or three bounces faster.

And I'll nod knowingly at your tongue biting on my crappy taste in applications... hehe... I'm not going to defend Microsoft in any way, nor will I bash them at this time. Let's just say I haven't experienced NEARLY as many problems as everyone else here. IE never crashes on me. Office runs like a charm, even on a dated G4/400 PCI machine. MSN I need to communicate with those friends of mine that are still stuck under Microsoft's iron fist -- still, it's never given me any problems.

Also, I ran the same test with non-internet tools -- iTunes, Office applications, Painter, Bryce, etc... with the same slow results until I restarted or logged out/in again. Weird.

I also noticed that prebinding "frees" up memory originally allocated by applications. Try it yourself -- see how much free memory you have before you update the prebindings, and again afterwards. There's a noticeable jump, like you just restarted or something.