Well, my app takes too long to load. It's a commercial app, so I was hoping to make it as fast as possible, but it takes an annoying 11 sec on my P3/450 mhz/128 MB Machine -- and is depressingly slower on average machines. Woe is me. This is the first app I ever wrote, and everything works great except for this one problem.

Sure, I've got a splash screen with a progress bar, but the problem is that it takes many seconds for my main form to even get to the Form_Load event(after calling Load Form). The splash screen just sits there for a while before the progress bar starts to actually move.

The main form is control-rich (many textboxes & datagrids on SStabs) so I guess it's taking a long time to load it all into memory. Total size of .exe is 344KB. I cannot remove any controls from the form, as product launch is ASAP and there's no time to redo the user interface.

I've tried:
1. Trying both P-Code and native code compiling
2. Trying to optimize for size vs speed
3. Using a compression program to reduce the size of my .exe even further
4. Converting all ADODC's to simple ADO recordsets
5. Loading ALL graphic resources at runtime only
6. Removing all other forms from the project
7. I even went so far as to replace all standard buttons and textboxes with windowless versions to reduce resource usage.

Result: NO improvement, not even 1 or 2 seconds faster!!!

Before I call it quits, I thought I'd ask you guys for any suggestions, in case there's something I missed. Thanks for reading this long post.