THis is an odd situation. I have Mandrake 10 community running on 3 machines. but on the fastest one, (AMD XP 2500, 1.5 gigs ram, WD hardrive UDMA 5, ASUS MB with Nforce 2 chipset ) KDE takes aprox 2 to 3 minutes to start after boot up, opening Mozilla takes like 30 seconds to a minute, all programs in X take exceptionallly long times to start on the first run. I can then close the program and I can restart it in a blink of an eye. Even if I kill KDE and restart it from command line, it will start up almost instantly. Log out and login as another user and KDE and previously run programs start up quickly as long as some user has started them once since boot.

Identical installs on An AMD 1.4 ghz Athlon with 256MBram, and a dual athlon 1.2ghz with 1.5 mbram do not exhibit this problem. KDE and other programs start up with consistant (and fast) speeds.

Anyone else seen this kind of behavior?

I had a sound problem with one of the beta releases that caused that - a broken aRTs, which was fixed after a ew days in Cooker (which I was using to upgrade with at the time). Perhaps its something like that. I don't know how to track that really, though. Check in /var/log/messages and other related log files to see if something like that is happening.

I have seen a glitch with the arts sound on the other machines.
I don't see any errors coming up in the logs
I will try disabling all the sound stuff and see if that makes a difference.

You'll lose the system alerts, but you can pipe all the important stuff like your music and audio from video sources through alsa anyways. Good luck. If you find anything definite, I, as well as the rest of the membership (and our watchers from Google) would like to know.

Well, I have turned off everything sound and system-wise that I could and
still have a bootable and Xfree viable system.

I boot fairly quickly to the command prompt, but doing a startx gives
me this kind of timeline:

0:00 startx
0:25 (25 seconds) nvidia driver logo appears on screen
0:45 background screen color shows up
1:15 I begin to consider Going back to *ack* Redhat
1:30 KDE logo appears and begins it's animations
1:45 Wipe away the froth that is acumulating at the side of my mouth
2:05 KDE is loaded and system is ready.

Two minutes and 5 seconds is way outa line for an Athlon XP2500 with a gig and a half of ram.
If I kill the Xserver and do another startx without rebooting the machine, KDE starts in 20 seconds.
I swapped back to the "nv" generic nvidia video driver just in case, but got the same times.

I rebooted and started Icewm instead of KDE, it took 35 seconds to load the first time.
I then opened Mozilla for the first time, it took 45 seconds to start in Icewm. After that I could
kill X, restart Icewm and Mozilla took less than a second to start.

I'm thinking that it may have some issues with disk I/O and the motherboard's Nvidia chipset.
During the 45 seconds that mozilla is loading, the HD LED is glowing furiously. I optimized for
best drive performance with hdparm and get like 35MB/s xfer, I don't think mozilla loads much more than that into memory, so what the heck else could be going on that is keeping the drive busy for 45 seconds is beyond me.

I will keep at it.

It really sounds to me like Xfree is causing your headaches, then. I wonder what's causing it to be so slow. My P-III 700 w 256mb on an old ata33 controller boots KDE in about 30 sec and icewm (if I still had it) takes about 2 sec. XFCE boots in 7-10, Windowmaker is almost instant. Gnome was about 30.

I don't know what's going on with that. Perhaps a driver or two that you don't have are being called for.

Try /var/log/XFree86.0.log if you already haven't. See if there is a driver failing (you know, like freetype or glx or whatever)

How about you tell www.mandrakeexpert.com.
But before you do that, try this kernel: kernel-i686-up-4GB-2.6.3.4mdk
I found it in rpmdrake, it's on cd 1.