my startup time FWIW was with about 60 vst and over 100 AU.

in any case it's obvious live is starting and being snappier on a mac, even though ultimate cpu performance is lower than on windows

i have 228 plugins installed and did not test without them

My normal startup time is 2 seconds. I don't understand what importance number of VST's have with Ableton? As i can see ableton only scan first time and from there it will start up in two seconds. Only if you added something to VST directory it will scan it(second or two).

start time of 60 seconds seems like a hell to me.

Btw your project seems to take 27 seconds here with all Sylenths..

Win 7 64 bit, 32 bit ableton, I7 2600k, 32 bit sylenth..

I don't know that seems a bit ok. I can't understand in which scenario i would use 50 Sylenth. 27 seconds sound like my comp is able to load 2 of them per second.

that is A LOT!!

I use Live and Sylenth1 on a Windows 7 core i7 laptop and they load fairly quickly. Live takes about 60 seconds to load and sylenth takes about 30 seconds to load initially. I don't have any performance issues out of either product.

damn I cannot even think of 228 plug ins off the top of my head. How many of them do you actually use? I have 75 ish and I thought I had a lot of plug ins.