Hi Nick, that's odd - this is the full version you're talking about, not the demo version right?

On my 7 year old machine over here it starts up in about 5 seconds...

Is it possible that your virus checker is interfering with things? MoI does use the Internet Explorer engine to display its UI and sometimes virus checker programs try to hook into the various mechanisms of that to screen everything that is happening in the engine.

Do you get any different result if you disable any anti-virus or anti-spyware systems and then launch MoI?

- Michael