I just bought a copy of WinXP Professionall (student version) and tried the trial of mIRC.
It now takes about 10-20 seconds to start mIRC. You can see the status-window of mIRC but the app seems to be down ... then after a while "mIRC option" appears and everything works fine.
Is this a known problem and / or is there a work-around?
As far as I can remember, no one has reported such a problem before.
If you disable the "pop up connect dialog on startup" option, as well as any other on startup options, does mIRC still pause the next time your run it?
The only thing I can think of is that something else on your system may be interfering with mIRC, such as an anti-virus program. Are you running anti-virus software?