[Jeremy Linton <jli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As a FYI:

I have been having problems with startup time (> 1 minute) with a 1.1.2 version compiled from the source tar (suse 11). 
So I went looking and discovered the majority of the startup time in my situation was actually the splash screen updates.

I replaced the splash_update in the call to epan_init() (gtk/main.c) with a NULL, and that cut the startup time to less 
than a second. I found some other comments complaining about the number of plug-ins causing slow startups, but it looks 
like in my case its more a case of trying to update the progress bar on the splash screen causing slow startups than 
having hundreds of plug-ins.