>I have an VFP 6 (SP4) exe running on a PII 266 with 64MB RAM - from a cold start it takes 16s to load !
>When I run it again and subsequently it takes about 3.5s
>
>Is this difference purely the time it takes to get the Fox runtime loaded - is there anyway I can reduce this initial loading time.

Where are the runtimes and EXE located? They should all be local for best performance.

If they are local, the next I would go for is running the vfp Coverage Log to see where exactly the bottleneck is.