I have an older machine. Lwks takes 1 minute and 47 seconds to start. During that time W7 indicates the program is not responding and wants to know if I want to shut it down. It only happens on the first start of the day. Is this behaviour normal?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say NO

Succinct.

Out of curiosity, have you looked in the Logs to see if there is a spot that it seems to be hanging at? Maybe it's trying to load codecs or something? Have you tried running it as an Administrator? Does it make any difference?

Pardon my prior succinctness. I imagine it wasn't that helpful

I'm not seeing anything in the error logs, at least nothing I recognize as indicating a problem. I have checked the "Run as Administrator" box in properties\compatibility window. The shield icon is displayed on the shortcut icon. I've only glanced at it a couple of times with perfmon running. It seems to hang when the status bar is almost finished with "loading". Perfmon definitely thinks the program is not responding at some point. The line item text color changes to red (I think).

I haven't visited Windows' event logs, yet. I looked at the other lwks logs, but I have no idea what they are saying.

A good sense of humor is always helpful.

It appears in my application that MsMpEng is taking priority over the program @ initial startup.