The delay is caused by Windows needing to store the start menu in the memory and is a normal function. Once memory resident it will open instantly. Your system will be optimised to give memory priority to programs. You can change priority but it hardly seems worth it.

Some skins are more complex than others. Darkling uses 24bit colour and 150 pixels per inch resolution and the start menu bitmaps are full size - it's the only way to get those lovely smooth tones. Standard XP uses 8bit and 70 ppi with small tiled bitmaps hence smaller memory footprint.

I mainly use PSP, but I do have Photoshop Elements. I assume this is the same as Photoshop but without the 'trimmings'. I just tried saving a file as 32bit bitmap and it worked fine. I don't know enough about Photoshop to be able to answer. Sounds a bit odd though.

That's where I looked - it says:
Width: 80 pixels
Height: 33 pixels
Horizontal Resolution: 149 dpi
Vertical Resolution: 149 dpi
Bit Depth: 32
Frame Count: 1

Thanks Fuzzy. Guess I'll have to figure out whats up on this end. >

It seems there is also a Registry Key that addresses this issue with 400ms being the default, some links:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=start+menu+delay

Maybe you have to many programs loading up at startup. Might want to check that out and see if you need them and close them out if you don't.

You can control what's starts at boot with msconfig