OK - stopped mouth-breathing and thought about this - I went to Dopus and navigated to my start menu and simply highlighted the four shortcuts to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access and hit ENTER. All four loaded in under three seconds (but more than one - I used my mechanical wristwatch so the timing is not very accurate, but close enough). If I hadn't been timing it, it would have seemed instantaneous

BTW Nosh - very sweet system

PS added in EDIT: Just to note, in my case this isn't a very fair assessment as my computer has been up and running for about 13 hours and I've used both Word and Excel in that time. FWIW, opening ALL the links in my Office 2007 Enterprise folder took 8 seconds, including clicking on five dialogues - one for OneNote (no, I did not want to create a Notebook) one for Groove (no, not interested in creating a profile), two related to WinPatrol 2007, one for UAC and the other from WP itself wanting to know if I approved of adding OneNote to my system startup folder (nope), and finally an inexplicable error message from Endnote (which is NOT set up to open automatically with Word)

I also wound up with a second instance of Outlook open...