mathematica startup time

Question

I have Mathematica 7 and 8 installed on my laptop. Mathematica 7 starts quite fast, but Mathematica 8 is extremely slow to start. In the Option Inspector I canceled the "welcome screen" option at startup, and I tried canceling "opening a new notebook" at startup so that only the front end opens without any blank notebook, but as soon as I open a notebook, the whole front end freezes for about half a minute before opening it. As I said I do not experience this problem with M7. In this forum I have already found something related to my problem here but it doesn't answer it. I ran the command shown there which shows the time M8 spends to start and I got the following output :

{
 {"Initializing kernel connections..." -> 0.265},
 {"Initializing cell styles..." -> 0.764},
 {"Initializing fonts..." -> 1.076},
 {"Initializing menus..." -> 1.108},
 {"Initializing defaults notebook..." -> 1.654},
 {"Initializing defaults clipboards..." -> 2.278},
 {"Initializing internal preferences..." -> 2.418},
 {"Initializing kernels..." -> 3.619},
 {"Opening Welcome Screen..." -> 12.059},
 {"Closing Splash Screen..." -> 12.09},
 {"Preloading Favorites..." -> 12.137},
 {"Handling CommandLineOptions..." -> 12.137},
 {"Opening Files..." -> 12.137},
 {"Do Startup Action..." -> 12.137},
 {"Finished" -> 12.137}
}

and as you can see it seems that most of the time is spent on opening the splash screen just to close it 20 ms later !!!!!!! Do you guys have any idea how to overcome this.

I have asked support for this but ... well ... extremely poor assistance. So I am asking here. Thank you in advance :)