DescentBB

Does anyone have any idea what could cause a d3 server launched on a slower machine load up so much faster than on another faster machine (ie. the difference between 10 seconds and 2 minutes)

Start Minimized for 10 seconds and under. Start normally and the GUI slows loading to a crawl.

win2k loads faster than 98, also

<-- agrees to Testiculese.

I found out that Servers started with the Servertool by DE-Hunter started in 8-10 sec. Without it it used about 1 min. to start

When I told Roadrunner about this he told me that it is only a fault of the minimize / maximize thing.

If you minimize the console window manually it sometimes uses a little time to react on that request, but then is much quicker...

I'd recommend to use the "launch servers minimized" option in the Global Options of the Servertool, and only disable this in the case of errors like "could not load dedicated config file"...

Is there a way to make it automatically minimize (assuming we aren't using the server tool?)

Yep, make a shortcut, right-click->Properties, There's a dropdown for Run:
<Normal Window>
<Minimized>
<Maximized>