Do you have any virus scanner installed?
A lot of these scan every EXE at load time, even when it was scanned when written to disk at install time. That can take quite a while, when you look at the size of some of the .exe files involved.
For the record, I get sub second launch time by leaving Vmware Tray running.
And of course I suffer having all these monster programs running all the time. But since I'm in and out of Vmware many times a day the instant loading is worth the memory.
