I've never noticed this, however, I don't have a ton of tabs and icons on my tabbed dock.  How many tabs.  How many icons.  This may be the culprit coupled with your box's specs...

While I agree with the number of tabs/icons point, I have been using five dock layouts for years now and I do have to agree with the original poster.  It seems as though Object Dock Plus never "caches" the icons once a layout if complete and does a very simplistic read everything from scratch one by one at startup time. 

Now Vista has its own caching algorithm which seems to help this greatly, so I really haven't noticed this since moving up to Vista/64.  But on XP it was quite a long wait indeed.

I never really considered it problematic but ya I see a longer load time with tabbed docks too (XPHome).

My tabbed dock on the system I'm sitting on now got 10 tab and 129 items total including spacers. It's a mix of appliation shortcuts and well as documents and folder shortcut.

Adding to this, another determining factor could be where are the tab's icons that you're using located, such as a large subdirectory, proprietary folder or another drive.  This takes an amount of seek-time as well.

I agree with you both.

I don't look at it as a problem, but my system does wait for my five single tabs longer than anything else on boot.  I see nothing detrimental towards the over-all system behavior, because all I start up with is OD, WB and a wall. 

And I would imagine the work-around could be not to launch Object Dock at startup if you don't like the way it's booting.

I guess you can sit with a stopwatch to see the difference in nanoseconds.

But since I asked my system to launch OD on boot, to me it's worth waiting.  So use these apps to your liking but it's also our discretion in determining what's best for our system's behavior pattern.

Cp

Also, the systems I run have either XP Pro or Vista Ultimate, dual cores and 2-4GB RAM.

I'd say maybe CP hit it if you've got a rig like that.  Are all the icons buried in deep folders?

The icon paths?

I wouldn't know. It'd depend on the application, I've not bothered to apply any icon theme. Just plain old default icons.

The startup speed isn't a major issue, but since I use OD as my main appliation launcher it'd be nice if loading speed could be improved.

I just closed OD, waited 30seconds, then launched it again for an rough timing. The normal dock, with 5 icons, load in about half a second. The tabbed dock appears after about 10 seconds.

Doesn't feel like OD scales well with larger number of items. And I don't feel that the item count I have is excessive either.

Ok, but is it depreciated behavior that's getting progressively slower, or has it always worked this way for you Thom?

Because even if you're just loading several apps with their default icons into tabs, think about all a system has to do to find those apps in your system.

My tabs grabs the programs I've assigned from my primary C Drive, but I keep my custom icons that I typically use on my external USB D Drive.

I just turned my 2 docks and 5 single tabs off, waited 5 minutes and turned them back on while I'm typing this and my docks launched instantly and my 5 tabs took 1 second to relaunch after my docks.  That's about 60 apps with custom icons between 2 seperate drives.  Not bad.

And that's on XP Home.

Are you trimming the fat off your primary drive, keeping it clean, defraged, registry clean, anti-spy, anti-virus, above 50% used space?

Hopefully some of the stuff we share here can help.

Cp

My directories are HUGE.  Is there any way to auto-move all the images I am actually using into a new directory, so I can purge the original safely?

Now that you mention it, mine kind of does the same thing, although i never gave it any thought until now, now i watch and wait LOL, no big deal whats a few seconds, we are all in so much of a hurry all the time,

hehe, it's like mentioning a small noise while watching TV, isn't it?

The dev is now aware.

Now we wait for free cycles. 

That's great.

Should I create a support ticket for this?

Any news on new releases of ObjectDock?

hm... earlier it was possible to log into a page where it listed all your support tickets... is it still around?

As I mentioned it in another thread, my tabbed dock takes very long to boot as well. I'll concentrate my input in this thread now