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Hello Eric,
thanks for asking.
I too think this problem is caused by loading several apps at once at
startup time. Doing this usually leads to concurring disk access
which in turn leads to a massive slow down in disk performance for
each reader (== programming loading). I had Safari and Mail launch at
startup years ago until I got tired of the long loading times when
compared to launching the apps sequentially by hand.
To answer your side question: there's no advantage in doing so. The
feature was designed to help solve a problem with AppleŽ Remote
locking at a time where I didn't know how to solve this problem much
more efficiently ;-) .. I'll probably remove the feature again to
avoid confusion and reduce possible error sources.
As for the long reaction time, I've no explaination other than that
the system must be really busy at that time or AppleScript timing out
while waiting for a response to an AppleEvent it sent to an application.
Best regards,
Felix