I like reading Joel’s blog on software and in his latest post he talks about Apple Safari for Windows: The world's slowest web browser and the possible reason for the lack of performance as explained by Raymond Chen in one of his post, Performance gains at the cost of other components. In the end it all comes down to splitting up the work.
Currently I work on a domain driven project which shows the same symptoms, the application start up takes awfully long. I think the reason for our problems is the fact that sometimes you try to do too much at the start, like initializing the whole domain in one go, rather than following the principle of doing work on demand.