I hear you, but hopefully you'll admit as well that certain things not always under the control of the developer.

Some mornings Outlook loads faster than others. Once in a while, Outlook and Word seem to crawl...and then the next morning it's fine again. As a test, I did three consecutive cold boots on my older Pentium and loaded his program - and each time the first load varied in time by as much as three seconds. Some users would care greatly about that - and others are thinking about other things and may never notice, or notice but don't place a big weight on it.

A variety of factors and practices lead to satisfied customers, speed certainly being one of them.

Kevin