Back when I had a 15 second delay loading a Fox program on 386/20, I got a public domain text file and popped up a line from it randomly during startup.

The users enjoyed it so much they complained when, in upgrading to 486s, it flew by in a flash!

A lot of it has to do with perception. We have designed multi-tab forms based on a person's workflow. In VFP 6, they take a considerable amount of time to load, but once in, a person will do 90% of their work in that form. The reusable bizobjs come in very handy for that as they can be reused in a variety of places.