> I've been glancing at squeak startup time on the mac this 
> morning and have a few observations. Actually I have noticed on
> windows the images "SNAP' open, but take seconds on the mac and I'd  
> like to fix that...

Another thought: Is it possible that you're allocating the memory lazily and
the image loading process hits the exception handler upon first access to
each memory page? This might slow down things quite a bit. In the Windows VM
I am actually pre-allocating the memory needed for the image data (plus some
extra) before the read comes along to avoid this.

Cheers,
  - Andreas