Another question for you, Crunch-Z8 - Do you have any third-party packs or plugins that are loaded when VoiceAttack is launched? The reason I ask is because there's not a whole lot going on when VA is launched by itself (it should take only a short amount of time), unless there is a pack/plugin that is being loaded at the same time.
You can find out if plugins are loading by going into Options > General tab, and then verifying if 'Enable Plugins' is checked. If that is checked, click on, 'Plugin Manager' to see what plugins are being loaded at startup.
If there are no plugins loading, the long startup time *could* be related to the speech engine - hoping the fix from the previous thread solves all of this (waiting to see if that's helped or not).