I agree with you 100%. Before making such a statement, I wanted to make sure I wasn't suffering from the "nocebo effect". After testing RC1 (before the official version was released), I thought there was slowdown in desktop start-up, but I wasn't 100% sure. I therefore uninstalled RC1 and could sense my desktop start-up was "much quicker". I then reinstalled 1.75 - I didn't really notice a slowdown in start-up - It must have had a minimal impact on start-up or at least it was unnoticeable. When MBAM 2.0.1 was released recently, I thought I'd give it another whirl - and this time I was 100% convinced that MBAM 2x causes a slow down in my desktop start-up. I'm running W7 x64. Although for me, MBAM is not the first program that appears on my taskbar in start-up. Its the last program and it takes the icon a while to appear (possibly up to 5 seconds after all other icons have appeared - I never timed it with a stop-watch, but it definitely takes a few seconds more to load and appears to hold-up the entire desktop from being ready to use). For example, I also noticed the "network connection" icon takes much longer to "establish a connection" - It appears to wait for the MBAM icon to load first before it can establish a connection. I even experimented with delaying MBAM 2.X at start-up by 15 seconds in advanced settings, but it appeared this did not make any difference. Without MBAM 2 installed, the network connection establishes a connection with the Internet fairly quickly. I currently have MBAM uninstalled and start-up is fairly quick. I'll be reinstalling MBAM 1.75 and I think I'll be sticking with it for a long while yet. I hope the MBAM developers can take note and resolve this issue soon.