@jsulm It seems to be fixed, but I am not sure what did it. I performed a complete sweep for viruses an malware, nothing major found. Then switched to Win10 (I go back and forth between win8 and win10), and for a while my app would not even start, with a error 0xc0000139. Did a search for that error on the web, not much help. Used depends.exe to see what DLLs were getting loaded, but found out that is a dead project, not applicable to win10. Updated a third party app I link into. Then win10 decided to do an update, which fixed the 0xc0000139 error. I cleaned up some logging events, and that improved the slow startup issue, but I cant believe that was the entire fix. Given I did so much in no certain order, in the end I cant identify what did the trick!